My husband grew up making spritz cookies with his mom and siblings every Christmas: most often done with the Christmas tree mold, green food coloring in the dough for that certain parched-pine look and red hots for stars. Add sugar glitter.

It was a wonder to him that my family had done no such thing. I didn’t even know, when we got married, what a spritz cookie was. Oh, that’s the name for those. Oh okay.

Food coloring and kids was enough of a potential and a few times actual disaster (on the bathroom cabinet! On the outside wall! It’s paint on wood!) that–yeah, and so most of the time when he wanted his Christmas spritz he got them because he went out and bought that food coloring and he made them with the kids himself. Me, I’m more the chocolate chips in oatmeal or cranberry-pecan pie bar type. I did at least pitch in occasionally, but most years they did it all.

We went through at least three different spritz makers, including a battery powered one to shoot them out of at one point so they could mass-produce them faster to take to the neighbors, but getting them not to come out too thick was hard and the more easily controlled hand-press type was just the way you do it and the imposter was abandoned.

But the best part, always, always, was making paper plates of them and ringing the neighbors’ doorbells and seeing their faces light up that the kids had done that for them.

The next generation has now taken on the task and declared it good. You put the stars just so.