12 Christmas Cookie Recipes to Bake With Kids This Year
There's something about December that turns every kitchen into a bakery. The smell of cinnamon, kids with flour on their cheeks, and a cooling rack full of cookies that never quite make it to the cookie tin.
Baking Christmas cookies with kids is one of those traditions that looks picture-perfect and feels like beautiful chaos — and honestly, both are true. The secret is picking recipes that are forgiving, fun to decorate, and hard to mess up. Here are 12 of our favorites.
The Classics (Start Here)
1. Classic sugar cookies The undisputed champion of Christmas baking. A simple dough, cookie cutters in every shape, and a bowl of icing with sprinkles. Kids can roll, cut, and decorate — and every misshapen reindeer tastes just as good.
2. Gingerbread men Spicy, sturdy, and built for decorating. Gingerbread dough holds its shape well, which makes it perfect for little hands. Bonus: the house smells amazing for hours.
3. Peanut butter blossoms Three ingredients plus a chocolate kiss pressed in the middle. Kids LOVE the pressing part, and these are nearly impossible to get wrong.
4. Snickerdoodles Cinnamon-sugar rolled and crackly on top. No decorating required, which makes them ideal for when you want cookies fast and the kids just want to roll dough in cinnamon sugar.
A Step Up (For Confident Little Bakers)
5. Peppermint pinwheels Chocolate and peppermint swirled together — they look impressive but the swirl technique is just rolling and slicing. Great "wow" factor for cookie swaps.
6. Hot cocoa cookies Chocolate cookies topped with a marshmallow that melts into a gooey center. Tastes like a mug of cocoa in cookie form.
7. Raspberry thumbprints Buttery shortbread with a thumbprint of jam. Kids get to do the thumbprinting (their favorite part, obviously), and they look gorgeous on a platter.
8. Mexican wedding cookies Powdered-sugar snowballs that melt in your mouth. Only a handful of ingredients and no decorating — just rolling and dusting.
The Show-Offs (Worth the Effort)
9. Decorated Christmas cut-outs Royal icing, piping bags, the whole production. Save this for a dedicated decorating day with Christmas music and zero time pressure.
10. Linzer cookies Jam-filled sandwich cookies with a cut-out window on top. They look like they came from a European bakery and taste even better.
11. Chocolate crinkles Fudgy centers with crackled powdered-sugar tops. Dramatic, delicious, and surprisingly easy.
12. Spritz cookies Buttery pressed cookies in Christmas shapes. If you have a cookie press, this is its moment to shine.
Keep Your Favorites Forever
Every family ends up with "the" recipes — the ones grandma made, the ones the kids request by name. Don't let them live on stained index cards and phone screenshots. Our Christmas Cookie Recipe Cards ($4.99) give you 30 printable cards with space for ingredients, directions, and bake time — pretty enough to gift, practical enough to actually use. Fill them in once, and your family's cookie legacy is safe.
Happy baking — and remember, the flour on the floor is just evidence of a good time.