we interrupt this regularly scheduled holiday ... to show you a painting ... mostly just so that i'll stop eating christmas cookies while i type ....

... oh MY ... my family celebrates christmas .... complete with christmas eve mass and stocking hung by the chimney with care ... but it seems that this year, the holidays were all about cookies! .... i made traditional spritz ... a TRIPLE batch ... good grief what were we thinking ... but for the first year in many, we had a spritz gun that worked WELL and that the kids could manage ... so we just kept making them .... do you know what spritz are? ... you press the dough, in our case, butter cookie dough, through a weird gun ... i've made them every christmas for my whole entire life, i think .... i went through a decade or two of weak spritz presses .. but my new one is great .... so we made twobatches of butter colored spritz ... and one batch of green, or greenish ... all with sprinkles .... and each batch makes about 100 cookies ... they are small cookies, but that's still a lot of cookies, huh?

and then pepperkaker ...

that's our traditional swedish cookie ... it's like a gingerbread ... in fact, we made lots of gingerbread men .... here... read this .... oh wait, that was in norwegian ... maybe you can translate for me?

there's a photo of my floury brigade of bakers, in order: boy.beck.artist (my he's growing tall), girl.beck.artist, mom.of.e.beck.artist(hey mom, have i blogged your pic before?), and little.e.beck.artist ... we did a double batch of pepperkaker because mr.e.beck.artist likes NOT frosted ... and the rest of us LOVE to frost them .... so we needed plenty unfrosted and frosted ....

and ... since it is an artist's blog ... here's a painting i did a few weeks ago ... and i don't think i showed you a pic of it yet ....

thought i should toss that in, lest you forget i actually am an artist ... now... back to the cookie eating i go .... if you are celebrating holidays, i hope they are joyful ... and peaceful ... and that your new year is fab ...