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"  I&amp;#039;ll never forget the first Christmas in our new suburban house with the big kitchen I&amp;#039;d always wanted. We moved just in time for the holidays, and I knew the first thing I wanted to do was bake cookies with my son, who was two years old at the time, la Martha Stewart. I bought new cookie cutters, a rolling pin, and scoured the Internet for cookie recipes until I found the winner: a gingerbread recipe. I wanted our first batch of cookies to be perfect. On baking day, I mixed the ingredients together and rolled out the dough so my son could start using the cookie cutters. I gave him directions on how and where to use the cutters in an effort to mcontain the mess we were making.  My son enjoyed squishing the dough with the cookie cutters, but after a few tries he declared he was done. My iPod was playing my Christmas playlist in the background, and we hadn&amp;#039;t even made it through an entire song yet. I didn&amp;#039;t understand why my son didn&amp;#039;t want to make more cookies. He certainly loved playing with Play-Doh.  A couple of weeks later, my husband and I were going out for a date night, and my mother-in-law offered to watch my son. She showed up with ingredients for baking sugar cookies, but I jokingly warned her that my son had no interest in baking cookies. When we came back a couple of hours later, I couldn&amp;#039;t believe what I saw. My son was laughing hysterically, and my dining room floor was coated in dry flour. He was rolling out sugar cookie dough on my dining room table and sprinkling dry flour on the dough. My mother-in-law, who was standing next to him, was covered in quite of bit of dry flour, too. My OCD husband took one look at the dining room and went outside\u2014I think he was hyperventilating. I almost cried looking at the mess, thinking what a pain it was going to be to clean it up. But my son looked up and greeted me with the biggest smile. He told me he was having so much fun making cookies with grandma.  I quickly realized why: She wasn&amp;#039;t giving him directions on how to use the cookie cutters or telling him to stop making a mess on the floor. She was just letting him enjoy the process of baking cookies \u2013 unlike me who tried to control every part of the process. The type-A mom in me wanted perfection. My son just wanted to have fun.  So a new holiday tradition was started: My son making cookies with his grandma. As soon as my second son was old enough to wield a rolling pin, he joined in. And those two don&amp;#039;t just make double the mess, it can look like a flour bag exploded in my dining room. And I&amp;#039;m okay with that.  Now my husband on the other hand\u2026 Tracey Black is the author of Don&amp;#039;t Mess with Mama, a blog about parenting, work-life balance, healthy eating, and life as a far from perfect mom. She has three boys under the age of eight, and lives in San Diego, California. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.redbookmag.com/life/mom-kids/news/a13228/holiday-christmas-cookie-mess/>