Sweet bites from the oven make Christmas satisfying to "cookie monsters" of all ages.Photos by Fan Zhen / China Daily

There are six cookies that are made every year in C.J. Henderson's family, and they have become a Yuletide tradition. She shares the stories and the recipes.

Every Christmas season begins with baking. There will be carols and decorations and gift-wrapping, but for me it never truly feels like the holidays until we sit down at the kitchen bench and begin to cream butter and sugar. Butter and sugar. It's amazing how many different cookies begin this way.

This year is my first spent flying solo in the cookie workshop. The old, time-tested recipes are now my responsibility to keep going and I'm the fourth generation of women to make them.

The six cookies we make every year come from the recipes of my great grandmother, Irene. We make some adjustments, of course, asserting our own influence over the tradition.

The Mexican wedding cakes now have cinnamon in them. The toll house cookies have a hint of peanut butter. And the bourbon balls are made with Scotch whisky.

These are the Christmas cookies from my childhood and are the simple, traditional little morsels we waited for each year.

We "stole" dough as it was chilling overnight.

We would "rearrange" it on trays in the fridge, thinking mom wouldn't notice, as the generations before us did. We climbed on each other's shoulders to reach the shelf where the cookie tins lay hidden.

We risked the trouble, the sighs from our mother.

"These are for gifts!" she would say, but in the end, she always relented. In the end, the mothers laughed at our gluttony. My mom tells me this is part of the tradition - to leave the cookie dough chilling, unguarded, for the children to sneak in and steal bites.

It is also tradition for the mother to make ferocious faces and pretend to scold when she discovers the missing cookie dough, and then to laugh out loud when the children look afraid.

Every family has a tradition.

My mother comes from the United States, but even in the heat of an Australian December, she feels the pull of tradition to bake these little holiday treats.

She tells me she can feel Grandmother Irene watching her, so she casts off her sarong in favor of an apron, and turns away from watching her four sons play cricket on the beach, takes me by the hand and shows me the way in our big open kitchen.

Mixing, kneading, shaping, baking, decorating. It's the Christmas dance we've done every year.

Now that I am older, mom will wait until I come home for Christmas to begin the baking. We sip whisky meant for the fruitcake and she scolds me, making improvements to my technique.

"These are supposed to be small little bites," she will say, taking a ball of dough three times too big out of my hands, swiftly dividing it into three.

One holiday season with a New York aunt, I was amazed to see the exact cookies being made. We ate the same six cookies we had every Christmas. They looked, smelled, tasted like Christmas, like home. Even though they were made hemispheres apart, they were made by family hands.

The ritual is in the baking, in staying up late and waking up early to make sure all is ready for Christmas devouring. Cookies are the best Christmas decoration for the home. In fact, sometimes they even provide us with a bit of Christmas theater.

While carols play, I watched my four brothers search through the cookie tins for their favorites, casually going from tin to tin, from plate to plate, mischievously hunting out the ones they love the most.

Steele with the Chinese almond. Noah with the toll house. Josh loves melting moments, and Nic hoards the bourbon balls.

Mine are the Mexican wedding cakes, and everyone loves the almond shorts, especially my two little nephews who aren't allowed near the more sugary cookies.

So, for a bit of Christmas indulgence, or a bit of fun in the kitchen, try out these simple cookie recipes to see which is your favorite, and which will become a tradition in your home.

Contact the writer at sundayed@chinadaily.com.cn.

(China Daily 12/23/2012 page14)