Photo by Geoff Carter
By Geoff Carter
Tis the time of year for holiday traditions. We hang the lights, trim the tree, sing the carols, buy the presents, drink the eggnog, and bake the cookies. We watch our holiday favorites on TV. Some of us still send Christmas cards. Like most of us, I have fond memories of baking, decorating, and eating the family Christmas cookies. My grandma used to make the most delicious sugar, pecan, and snowball cookies. She kept her faded recipes in one of little hinged tin box up on the kitchen shelf. My daughter has recently joined the ranks of the traditional family bakers, making the most awesome brown sugar cookies I’ve ever tasted.
A relatively new tradition is the annual cookie decorating party. We get together to bake all varieties of cookies but mostly to decorate the sugar cookies with frosting. A large part of the tradition is decorating the sugar cookies with humorous, current, and offbeat designs—the more outlandish the better. In the past, we’ve done the logo from “The Morton Downey, Jr. Show”, sugar cookie portraits of Sally Jesse Raphael, pride flags, the Teletubbies, the Residents (the band), hanging chads, Covid masks, and more. Last year, we paid homage to the streaming sensation White Lotus 2 by making (or attempting—it’s not easy with frosting) to make portraits of Jennifer Coolidge’s character Tonya.
There really aren’t any rules for the sugar cookie jubilee—only our own standards of taste and propriety. I was shouted down a few years ago when I proposed decorating a John Bobbitt body part cookie. “Too much,” they said. “Too much.” Dahmer cookies were also deemed to be too far outside the guardrails of good taste. We did channel our inner teens and decorate marijuana leaves to commemorate the legalization of pot in Colorado. Of course, along with our sugar cookie editorials, we do pay homage to the traditional stylings of white stars, pink hearts, yellow moons, and silver snowflakes. (They are magically delicious). Of course, cookie portraits of our beautiful and beloved pets, especially the kitty cats, are also in the mix.
We love to commemorate the leaders and tastemakers (influencers in the modern vernacular?) in our society. We did portraits of Obama in 2008 to celebrate our first African American president. Oprah, the notorious RBG, and Hillary Clinton have also joined the ranks of the rich and famous—and calorific, as have sports heroes like Brett Favre—with crocs. I also tried—unsuccessfully—to depict the QAnon Shaman.
I started to ponder how to decorate our Christmas cookies early last week. What was novel and stirring about our last year? The continuing political turmoil and grinding wheels of justice seemed too depressing for the holiday season (although I was considering a depiction of Kevin McCarthy with a red capital “C”—for compromise—on his chest). The idea of a Rudy Giuliani cookie with dripping hair dye was broached, but the technical difficulties of creating a recognizable portrait of Rudy seemed too intimidating to tackle.
“What really made last year memorable?” I wondered. The triumph of democracy over the powers of greed and vice? Not there yet. The resilience of our justice system? Not there yet. Maybe a portrait of Jack Smith. Notable, but kind of scary for a Christmas cookie. The trend of book banning, particularly the children’s book Tango Makes Three, about a gay penguin couple adopting a baby penguin, seemed like it could make a good cookie. And then it hit me: Barbenheimer—the unholy melding of the incredibly popular and brilliant movies Barbie and Oppenheimer.
Barbie, with its iconic star, Pepto pink color scheme, beautiful Barbie Dream House/Ken’s Mojo Dojo Casa House, weird Barbie, horse motifs, and thematic underpinnings of feminist empowerment versus the male patriarchy, seemed perfectly ripe for sugar cookie transformations.
Oppenheimer, the story of the genius who built the atomic bomb, was less translatable to a sugar cookie than Barbie (who is after all, mostly a sugar cookie), but we were still able to come up with the bomb—literally a cookie that resembles Fat Man—or Little Boy. I always get them confused.
We didn’t do any Taylor Swift cookies, although we probably should have. In years past, we did the iconic pink Pussyhats, designed to raise awareness about women’s rights. With the overturning of Roe and the subsequent electoral backlash against those who would rule another person’s body, doing a few of those would have been appropriate for this year. Fani Willis, the prosecutor tasked with bringing a former allegedly felonious president to justice, would have made a good cookie, as would Rachel Maddow or Liz Cheney. Heroic sugar cookies.
Then there is George Santos. We did do a number of cookies based on this paragon of the mendacious and ludicrous. Indeed, we agreed, here was fertile ground for a sarcastic sugar cookie: a character(s) steeped in untruths, hypocrisy, fraud, larceny, and ludicrous lies. A man who wears layer upon layer of sweaters, jackets, shirts, and who knows what else. The iconic horn-rimmed glasses and Botox-reinforced lips. Santos’ fantastic stories transcend simple lying and verge into the realm of fantastic fiction—or psychotic delusions.
George Santos is an idiot, a huckster, and a fraud, but in this era of half-truths, mistruths, and deliberate and outrageous prevarication, he has become an icon. His claims to have been a drag queen in Brazil, his assertion that his mother was an 9/11 survivor and that his grandparents lived through the Holocaust, and—indeed—that he is Jewish, are categorically false. Defrauding animal lovers, veterans, dog owners, and his own donors is despicable. It is his epic reaching, the monumental size and outrageous boldness of his lies that take him from the border of the ludicrous to the threshold of straight-out ballsiness. So, we immortalized him as a sugar cookie.
We were all over the place with our frosting choices, depending on our passions or likes. Some of us made sports logo cookies. The Kansas City Chiefs logo is especially impressive. My wife and I should have made wine bottle cookies (Burgundies, please.) I made a couple of Ukrainian flag cookies in solidarity with the sufferings of a country saddled with an unjust war. It seemed to soon—and too raw—to do anything about the Hamas Israeli War.
Photos by Geoff Carter
The point—besides good clean fun—of frosting our cookies is to be together for the holidays. Making the cookies is part diversion, part commiseration, and part affirmation. We might laugh at Mr. Santos’ insipidity or revel in Ken’s misguided egoism in Barbie (see Mojo Dojo Casa House), but they struck a chord in all of us, as did Notorious RBG, the stupidity of banning a book about gay penguins, or our pets.
The holidays are a time for families to get together, share, celebrate, and enjoy each other. Decorating these cookies is just the frosting on the cake.