Holiday Treat fave: Santa Claus cookies / cookies with a past

In honor of Irrepressible Nephew turning TWELVE, RantWoman is opting for nostalgia and reminiscences about those days long ago before there was dirt or at least before there  were satellite TV and ATM cards. RantWoman promises the exuberant tween plenty of unsolicited advice and Sensible Auntie vigilance but today's topic is cookies!

RantWoman hereby posts her beloved since childhood holiday cutout cookie recipe, along with obligatory copyright reference--if available--and other story digressions. Readers who are in a hurry should just scroll down quickly.

The copyright issue: this recipe has been copied and recopied in Rant family kitchens for decades. It originally came from a holiday recipe folio published by the local gas company somewhere in the vicinity of Gunnison CO. If anyone is getting their knickers in a bunch about citation, RantWoman welcomes help retrieving more precise info than this.

RantWoman will as usual include both the recipe as received and the recipe as usually cooked at RantWoman's house. But first digressions based on the recipe name.

1. RantWoman was an early partisan of Christmas cookies. One of RantWoman's first Christmas exploits was to pull over the family Christmas tree. It had been hung with some kind of Christmas cookies and RantWoman clearly had her priorities. RantWoman notes it also was probably more rewarding to pull over the Christmas tree full of cookies than to pull the cuckoo clock off the wall, another RantWoman early childhood achievement.

2. The RantParents did not start out their parental ventures as big partisans of Santa Claus.Christmas was a RELIGIOUS holiday. That meant lots and lots of extra concerts, church choir practice, performance anxieties, and other music and various reincarnations of the Baby Jesus. Presents were exchanged in recognition of the Three Kings--which RantDad was known to refer to as The Three Wise Guys gifts for the newborn King. There were stockings. But RantWoman's memory is that Santa Claus arrived on the scene only with Rant Siblings and greater contact with the amoral secularizing and corrupting influences of the outside world.
3. Santa Claus cannot have been completely absent. To this date, one of the most beloved Christmas decorations at RantMom's house is a stuffed Santa Claus Grandma sewed for the RantChildren. Grandma died only a year or so after the move to the Real House when the RantChildren were still very young.   4. As Oldest Child, RantWoman survived not only considerable parental harrumphing about Santa Claus but equal certainty about television. RantWoman notes, it's pretty easy to be morally pure about television if one lives over mountain passes in all directions from wicked television signals but technology and telecommunications also marched on.   Along came the RantSiblings and a move to a Real House, a Real House with real neighbors.  One set of Real Neighbors not only had a television, they had a COLOLOR television--with cable! Guess which Friends all of the Rant Children regularly invited ourselves over to. Another set of neighbors Bill and Marty (child's eyes getting wide) slept IN THE SAME BED, right smack in the middle of the country, hundreds of miles from those decadent coasts. Actually the Rant Children hardly gave the sleeping arrangements a thought; we were more interested in their television, oh and later the adorable kittens born at their house.
Santa Claus and television are bound together in RantWoman's memory because one year the Real Neighbors (who slept in the same bed) got a new television. Santa Claus also somehow screwed up deliveries and left a whole bunch of presents--besides a hand-us-down television--under the Christmas tree at their house. After that it was all over: the Rant Children sat on Santa's lap and tried to make coherent requests. The RantChildren wrote letters to Santa who frequently translated the requests in Sensible directions. On Christmas Eve, the Rant Children propitiated the Red Chimney Scrambler with offerings of milk, cookies and sometimes whatever other calorific blandishment warmed our kitchen. And the holiday spirit survived!

The recipe? Oh the recipe:

Into a sifter:
3 3/4 cups flour
(RantWoman tends to use about 1/2 whole wheat; this year RantWoman has unbleached flour and wheat germ and will have to figure out an appropriate wheat germ substitution.)
1 1/4 teaspoon baking powder
1 1/4 teaspoon cloves
2 1/2  teaspoons cinnamon


Cream together:
1 1/2 cups butter or margarine at room temperature
2 cups brown sugar
(RantWoman uses less, no more than 1 1/2 cups. This and the flour substitution change the texture. RantWoman likes her modifications fine, thank you very much.)
1 egg

Sift the flour and spices into the butter / sugar / egg, about 1/3 at a time.

Gather the resulting dough into a ball, put in a bowl, cover. Chill.

When the dough is well-chilled, roll on a floured board to about 1/8 inch. Cut into shapes desired.

Bake on ungreased cookie sheet, 350 degree oven, 8-12 minutes depending on cookie size, until ediges are just slightly brown.

Cool cookies and ice with desired icing and decorations.

Red hots and colored sugar can also be baked into cookies.

RantWoman apologizes if these directions seem to curt. RantWoman has baked these cookies dozens of times and cannot imagine any alternative. But time saved on boiled down directions should always be reallocated to the chatter of preparation, rolling, cutting, baking , cooling, and Decorating. Unforgetable and never the same twice.