last night, we had a terpstra family gathering to celebrate kevin’s 35th birthday. along with the party came the annual decorating of the christmas cookies. this event has been happening well before i joined the family, and carries its own lore– the camel with red hot balls (not the christmas kind), gord’s creations that are ‘beautiful in their simplicity’, and many attempts to creatively turn the standard cutout shapes into things not necessarily christmas related–varying in levels of appropriateness. this year, grandpa gord cleverly turned a gingerlady upside down into a man wearing a top hat, to which sara exclaimed, ‘dad, he looks like a pimp!’. our very own sparkly-hatted christmas pimp. my simple yellow frosted circle with a single red hot in the center was accused of looking like a breast. hmm… overall, it was a relatively decent scene, perhaps for the sake of our youngest decorator. this was jude’s first foray into this delicate art, and he showed real promising talent.
he was really good at shaking the sprinkles onto the cookies, but not so dextrous when he then wanted to pick the extras up off of the plate. more than a few sprinkles ended up in zion’s territory. jude mostly liked eating the cookies.
because you can’t hide freshly decorated cookies in tupperware (and also i got tired of playing texas hold ’em and went to bed early), the colorful treats stayed the night on the racks (i’m sure they were up all night dancing around the kitchen). this morning, as i sat at the computer with my coffee, jude appeared at my side innocently holding a pink frosted treat. as if to say, ‘look mama, i just found this setting over there. what should we do with it?’ what goes better with morning coffee than christmas cookies? so we shared it. well, then, of course, he thought the rest were fair game, so he marched his little green sleeper back over there for seconds. he got his hands on one more before i could stop him and then proceeded to march around the house, cookie raised high, cackling loudly, tormenting zion with his stolen treasure. really, he was doing laps around the table, looking over his shoulder to make sure zion was still in hot pursuit.
then after that game had ended, it was soon discovered that the plates with extra sprinkles had been left in the top of the garbage can!
‘zion, do we eat these or roll around in them?’
now, evidence of the holiday season is beginning to appear all over our house!
hunting and gathering 
Lucky Zion! Buddy has to survive on only the lone cheerio here and there. Guess who wants to show up on your doorstep for Christmas (besides me, of course!)?