Handcrafted Christmas

Handcrafted Christmas:  Ornaments, Decorations, and Cookie Recipes to make at Home by Susan Waggoner       Hardback Book:  144 pages            

What fun books Susan Waggoner comes up with.   The nostalgia of Christmases past, craft items I remember seeing over the years and all with complete instructions from beginning to end on how to make them just as beautiful as you remember them or how you may have seen in retro shops.   Lots of smiles to be had here and she has given me a lot of ideas to use not just for home decorations although there is an abundance of them, but, lots of my family and friends have passed so I am having a field day coming up with great ideas for decorating their graves, too.  Morbid for some, maybe, but, necessary for me.   I always like to do them up fun in keeping with their personalities and my own, of course, hey, they can’t slap me now!  J   So cute and so clever not to mention nothing too off-putting for its degree of difficulty, either.    And the recipes for all the lovely Christmasy desserts – also – not difficult recipes to follow nor extravagant ingredients but wonderful Christmas favorites from our childhoods o.k. maybe your grandmother’s childhood, too, but good recipes survive sometimes hundreds of years or even more, delicacies like Russian Tea Cakes and Thumbprint cookies you can fill with jam or chocolate or caramel,  Lace Cookies, Pecan Tassies, Date Bars (we had Date Rolls – like a Jelly Roll only with dates), man the sugarplums are dancing in my head already.    Such fun books, Susan Waggoner, keep up the good work! J  I highly recommend this book to all ages.   Youngsters will require help to read the instructions and help crafting and baking but how fun would that be?   Really good book.

 - Shirley J.