Stop Spending Time with Your Kids to Have More Time to Spend with Them?

Something that bugs the hell out of me are these commercials with premade cookie dough, cut and ready to be laid out on the pan. The commercial implies that when the cookie dough is already made for you, you have more time to spend with your kids and less hassle. I was about to attack them for basically saying that everyone is dumb, but a lot of people are pretty dumb and would eat that up. Don’t enough people ignore their kids or let them waste their time playing video games and watching TV and not bonding with them ever?

When I was younger, we made cookies a decent amount, more often for Christmas. We mixed the dough, used our own plastic box full of cookie cutters and then designed them with sprinkles (we called them jimmies back then), colored sugar, and best of all those little silver balls that were probably full of mercury and not edible in the least. We have pictures and home videos of making these cookies and it was fun. What memories are kids these days going to have? If they’re lucky enough to make cookies at all it will be something like, “We put the cookies on the pan and then we ate them. And that’s how my eating disorder began.” And maybe the ADD too.

Speaking of Christmas, we used to go all out. We baked little shapes to paint and hang up on all the livingroom windows, and there were a lot of freaking windows. It looked like this but brown wood and not jutting outwards like that. They were also higher up since the house was a split-level and the livingroom was on the second floor.


We had angels and Christmas trees and snowmen and candy canes that we baked, painted, and put on little gold string to hang on each window. We put one of those electric candles in all the bedroom windows, had garlands up the stair railings, had Santa Claus' sitting around and put ceramic sleighs and trees that my grandma had made on the lamp tables. We had wreaths hanging everywhere that we had bought and poked little pieces of fabric into to decorate. The tree was lit and decorated with everything we had and the angel my mom sewed a long time ago with her and my father's initials was put on top. Our stockings had all been sewn or knitted by my mother with our names on them and we all dressed up, usually in red, for Christmas Eve and then again for Christmas Day. In fact, my sister and I wore dresses our parents got us for Christmas Eve and then the next day for our father's extended family's Christmas Day party we wore new dresses that our maternal grandparents had gifted to us the night before. The house was always thoroughly cleaned up before any Christmas decor went up and we played the Roche Sisters' Christmas songs while we decorated and then again while we opened gifts.

And now parents can't even roll cookie dough??? Are you effing kidding me???