It's Christmas! Day 18: Make a neighbor gift basket PLUS Chocolate Snowball Cookies

It’s Christmas! is a 25 day blog and vlog segment that I’ll be doing this December to bring you crafts, reviews, and ideas to make your Christmas season even more fun this year (especially, with this pandemic thing we’re all trying to navigate).

Hopefully, my family can inspire yours to not let this crazy year ruin the holiday season for you.

The most important part about Christmas is giving. Whether you’re giving thanks, giving presents to your family, giving money to charity, giving toys to kids in need, or just giving a little Christmas cheer to other people, you’re truly embracing the true meaning of Christmas. In my house, we celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ and talk about being kind and how God has given so much to us. However, whether you live in a religious household or not, giving is such an important lesson to learn.

So, while we do try to do multiple things to give back during the holiday season (like ringing bells for the salvation army or random acts of kindness), today we’re talking about making a gift basket for a couple neighbors. We want to spread some Christmas cheer and make our friends feel special.

There were a couple things we needed to consider.
Will people actually eat cookies if we make them? (You know, due to this whole Covid thing.)
How much do we want to spend?
Who do we want to make gift baskets for?

After we answered these questions, we got to putting our baskets together. We included some homemade chocolate cookies, homemade candy, a jar of homemade hot cocoa mix, some finger puppets, a couple crafts, pencils, sharpeners, erasers, stickers, and notebooks.

Here's how we made the cookies that we ended up including:

Ingredients:
1 2/3 cups flour
1 1/2 tsp baking powder
1/2 cup cocoa powder
1/4 tsp kosher salt
1/2 cup butter, softened
1 1/4 cups + 1/3 cup sugar
2 eggs
1 tsp vanilla
1/2 cup powdered sugar

Steps:
1. Add flour, baking powder, cocoa powder, and salt to medium bowl. Mix to combine. Set aside.
2. Add butter and 1 1/4 cups sugar to large bowl. Beat with electric mixer until light and fluffy.
3. Crack eggs into small bowl. Throw away shells and wash your hands.
4. Add eggs and vanilla to butter mixture. Mix until smooth and creamy.
5. Add dry ingredients to wet ingredients. Mix until a soft dough forms.
6. Cover dough and refrigerate 1 hour.
7. Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Line 2 baking sheets with parchment paper.
8. Scoop a level tablespoon of dough. Roll into a 1-inch ball. Repeat to use all cookie dough.
9. Add 1/3 cup sugar to one small bowl. Add powdered sugar to another small bowl.
10. Make snowballs! Dip each ball of dough in sugar, then dunk generously in powdered sugar to coat.
11. Set dough on baking sheets.
12. Bake 10 minutes. Cool 10 minutes. Serve.

I think they turned out pretty good! And they taste delicious!

Owen had a blast running up to their houses and putting our little gifts on their front porch!

So do something kind for someone else!

And as always, from my family to yours, Merry Christmas!