Gingerbread cookies are an essential part of Christmas. We made this year’s batch this weekend.

We have a whole pile of cookie cutters. I’m a traditionalist and prefer the Christmas-themed shapes: the Christmas trees, stars and hearts and angels, and the traditional gingerbread man and woman. Pigs have a very decoration-friendly shape, and so do mitten-shaped cookies.

The stranger shapes include a set with tiny animals and a boat, which I believe is Noah’s Ark, kind of thematically appropriate – but it also a train engine and a car. This set gets used a lot because the small shapes fit so nicely in between the larger cookies.

Another set has more animals, which for some reason includes a crocodile and a shark. Who hasn’t heard of Christmas crocodiles? Adrian especially likes the shark and the crocodile, so we usually end up with a lot of those.