The Christmas Cookie Club - Ann Pearlman

I've actually read it now! This was a fun book to read right before Christmas. It's book for grown-ups that is a story of Christmas cookies, yes, but more it's a story of enduring friendships of women over many years and the traditions they've built with each other. I enjoyed many parts of this book, but there were some things I thought could have been done better to make this an even better read.

The thing I enjoyed the most was the storyline of how he women have this Christmas Cookie Club tradition of getting together every year without fail on a certain day and exchanging cookies. I also loved the WAY they did it. Everyone prepared a special cookie that had some special meaning for them. Everyone put their cookies together for everyone else in a special, fancy containers of some sort. Everyone had to tell a story about their cookies - the why, the how, the where, whatever, about their cookies. I loved those things.

They also have another rule. If you're going to miss the actual party, you must send your cookies or you're kicked out of the club. I kind of like this rule, because I sort of have this thing about signing up for clubs. Either you're in, or your not. Of course, people have to miss meetings occasionally for something special or important or if you get sick. I get that. But I don't like when people join a group and then don't follow through by actually participating as part of the group most of the time. That's just me, and it's not a very tolerant side of myself, so I'm trying to let that go more, but I did love this rule for that reason. Commit, or don't, but you can't do both.

I also really liked that they put cookie recipes in the book, but they didn't put them all in there, which was disappointing. And I couldn't figure out why. It was kind of annoying, and threw me off in my reading experience, so that was disappointing.

The other thing I thought was a little jarring was the inclusion at the end of each chapter of information about an ingredient. Like there was one thing about flour, one about vanilla, one about sugar, etc. I kind of liked them, actually, but they were a little awkward at the same time. I think the placement was off and they were a little long.

Overall, I really enjoyed this book which I read about on another blog I like to follow called She Is Too Fond of Books, so I thank my friend Dawn for that recommendation!