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My mother always puts out a giant spread of various christmas sweets (sugar cookie cutouts, pfefferneuse, peanut brittle, windowpane cookies, etc), and year after year, the only dessert my family's interested in are her chocolate chip cookies. They're not festive in any way, but they're the finest cookie I've ever eaten. None of our family members or friends even touch the other offerings until all the chocolate chip cookies are depleted!

My mother and grandmother always baked very small spiced current cupcakes with a lemon (and rum? I don't even know) frosting. It takes about two bites to eat them and they are amazing and always carefully rationed. I imagine I could get the recipe and make it myself, but I think that might be a little like buying gifts for your own stocking. Some of the magic gets lost.

My mom always makes her sugar cookies, which are to die for!!! She makes them just perfectly , one day hopefully I will be able to make them as well as her:) She always tells me practice makes perfect. We also do finger food for Christmas Eve and at that we always have chicken puffs, which are mini gougeres with my mom's chicken salad in it.
I love the holidays, it's the time of year to indulge in the foods you try to stay away from the rest of the year.

latke madness. i think the fritter is just the perfect application for any starchy vegetable. i make them with potatoes, zucchini, yellow squash, sweet potatoes, carrots...this year i want to try a curried potato-and-pea fritter, basically a samosa ex-croute. mmm.

Christmas food at my house is the traditional feast seen through a Chinese lens. There's a turkey, but roasted like a soy sauce chicken and stuffed with savoury sticky rice. My uncle brings a completely vegan dish (usually mushrooms or bamboo hearts), as is customary for big Chinese celebrations. My sister bakes melt-in-your-mouth shortbread cookies.

But the best part of the night, after unwrapping gifts and a few Christmas carols is a raucous session of mah-jong.

Tamales on Christmas morning! With extremely hot salsa.

Latkes (potato pancakes)
Gluten-free sufganot (Jewish donuts)

And most of all I'm looking forward to going home today to eat more of these:

http://glutenfreebay.blogspot.com/2006/11/chocolate-dipped-apricots-gourmet.html

(Chocolate Dipped Apricots)

Wow, good 'ol fashion pastellios (Columbiano) and the donuts my mom would fry from leftover dough, then dip in maple syrup! Also, Puerto Rican pasteles (hope I spelled that right?) they scream holidays along with some excellant made coquito ~ Bravisimo!

OPPS! Correction I meant Colombiano! My ma would be soooo upset if she caught that!

My family doesn't really have any holiday cooking traditions other than a traditional American feast for Christmas lunch. My mom usually serves a lemon chess pie for dessert.

This time of year I like to indulge in pfeffernusse, hot cocoa, and Italian torrone. And heavier foods like quiche and tamales.

My mother always makes a traditional Ukrainian bread with dried fruit in it. She has a huge bowl to make it in and then she gives it as gifts. This year she is going to teach me how to make it.

For Christmas Eve (no meat allowed!) my mom makes these little pizzas by deep frying dough and then putting a little tomato sauce and some parmasean cheese on them.

We can't even wait for the platter to hit the table, usually all the kids lurk around the kitchen eating them as fast as she can fry them.

If there are any leftover, we put them in the toaster oven or just eat them cold right after opening presents!

Over the years there have been all sorts of debacles, like melting the cover of the fryer, blowing fuses in many kitchens, etc... but we still get our pizzas! As much as I love them, I'm kind of glad she only makes them once a year and keeps it special!

My mom doesn't cook, really, so I have made my own traditions. My hubby and I bake bread and deliver to all our friends and family.
And I always make bourbon balls!

We make pandoro and pavlova for Christmas and New Year's. The pandoro requires 8 egg yolks and the pavlova uses the whites.

Yay holiday food!

When I was little, gingerbread and shortbread cookies and mincemeat tarts with hard sauce were the standard homemade treats and my dad would make these cheese-rice-crispie savoury biscuits that were awesome. My grandma often makes carrot pudding for Christmas dinner's dessert. We always have my Mom's homemade cinnamon and fruit bread for Christmas breakfast. Alas, I now have to make all this stuff for myself if I want it. I tend to do the cookies and bread and only have the other bits if I go home.

All these comments remind me of the cookies that my German aunt sends us every year around the holidays. They're big round disks with what seems like a thin egg-white crust on the bottom, soft ginger cookie inside and chocolate over the top. They are fabulous and I would eat them every day all day if I could. Anyone know of them or know their real name?

Mmm, v in boston - you are thinking of Lebkuchen! They come from Nuremberg, but you can get them all over Germany at Christmastime, in various versions. Sigh....

v in boston: Yep, they're Lebkuchen. The ones with the white wafer bottoms are Oblaten-Lebkuchen. You can usually buy them at Trader Joe's and probably Cardullo's in Harvard Square.

In my family there are two special baked items, only made once a year:

The Serbian bread, Orevnitza. It's the same as the Slovenian Potica. It's basically a yeasted bread rolled out, filled with ground nuts, fruit and honey (in the case of ours walnuts and dates) and then rolled up and baked.

The sugar cookies. I think these come from my aunt rather than grandmother. They're rolled out sugar cookies, but the best I've ever had. They're soft, chewy, really buttery, almost flaky and they have buttermilk, which gives them a nice tang. When we make them with jam inside, they're like little pastries. Sometimes we just cut them out and frost them.

Wow, Vanessa! Those pastries both sound fantastic. Please feel free to share the recipes with us (if they aren't family secrets, that is). I just discovered a very nice, crispy vanilla cookie with raspberry filling--Cooking Light's raspberry strippers. I've provided the link to the recipe under my name.

Every Christmastime, my grandma would bake a traditional Czech sweet bread called hoska and mail it to members of our family. My mom has been perfecting how to bake this braided bread in recent years, and I think this year I will start too.

My mom also bakes Christmas Balls, which not only are delicious cookies but also make me giggle. She renamed them Snowballs so I'd quit snickering.

Oh wow!! Potica and houska show up in the same thread! Awesome. My family is Slovenian and Czech, so we make both of those. I made houska for Easter a couple years ago and I'll probably do a post here about that eventually...

What does your grandma put in hers, Shredder? We usually just use white raisins and slivered almonds.