Face it: most Christmas cookies aren’t all that good.

Maybe your cookies are good. Maybe you love Christmas cookies. I do, too… but not as much as I ought. As far back as I can remember, my grandmother has made cookies at Christmastime and had them set out for all to enjoy and ruin their dinner.

We usually had sugar cookies, chocolate haystacks, almond snowballs, peanut butter kiss cookies, and magic cookie bars. I have come to the conclusion that they’re all pretty boring. For different reasons. Let’s start with the two most Christmassy cookies on that list: sugar cookies and almond snowballs.

Sugar cookies cut into Christmas shapes and decorated in red and green is a timeless tradition. Roll it, cut it, bake it. Simple enough, but a lot of work for something that isn’t particularly impressive. The cookie is itself rather basic, with just a hint of vanilla flavor. Decoration either creates a wow factor or leaves you with a mess of colored fat and powdered sugar that will rot your teeth and gut.

Snowballs aren’t much better. A typical cookie batter with ground almonds subbed in for part of the flour, baked, and then tossed in powdered sugar to more closely resemble their namesake. Sounds good. Comes out too sweet on the outside and too bitter in the center. Not to mention messy.

Haystacks? Coconut and chocolate. Good start. Adding other ingredients will make them cookies rather than chocolates. Here’s an idea: Don’t add other ingredients. I believe my grandmother uses cocoa powder and condensed milk, with some nuts tossed in for texture. They either cook or dry into a chewy pseudo-cookie. Sound good to you? Well it is, somewhat. There isn’t anything Christmassy about it, however.

My grandmother’s magic cookies bars (an old Borden recipe, with butterscotch chips subbed in for half of the chocolate chips) and peanut butter kiss cookies have that same problem: nothing Christmas about them. Which leads me to the point of this digression.

I need to embark on a project of making Christmas cookies more Christmassy.

In fact, I’ve already done it with one recipe. Do you like oatmeal raisin cookies? Have a good recipe? Well, take that recipe and substitute dried cranberries for the raisins. In fact, use more cranberries than the recipe calls for to give extra color. These will be the red part of a red-green-white Christmas cookie trio. Oh, be sure to add nutmeg if your recipe doesn’t already call for it.