The biggest Christmas trauma in the Astle household of late was a dispute about how Christmas cookies should be made.

Shelly was brought up making literally hundreds of Christmas cookies every year, in four precise varieties: 1) pink bells with a white stripe across them, and silver balls on the donger; 2) white snowmen with three red-hot candy buttons, 3) yellow stars with yellow sugar sprinkles, and 4) green Christmas trees with sprinkles for decorations. In her household, there was no variation or shadow of changing from these four prototype cookie styles. The cookies were produced, as it were, on an assembly line, each one exactly like the others.

As for me, I have never made two identical Christmas cookies in my life. Granted, my family didn't make such a big deal out of Christmas cookies (we focus on our traditional cream cheese candies which only our family likes). But the point of decorating cookies, to me, was creativity.

When two people like this get married, sparks are going to fly. ("A blue bell? How could you make a blue bell! Bells aren't blue!" "They're not pink, either, dear.")

In the end, I think I won out, and it wasn't even by my incredible efforts at persuasion. We didn't have any cookie cutters, so we had to go buy some. The only choice we had was a huge box of 100 cutters, including the entire alphabet, dinosaurs, bats, Easter bunnies, footballs, and flags. While it did come with a bell, a snowman, and two sizes of stars and Christmas trees, it also had a gingerbread man (and woman), a candy cane, a stocking, a teddy bear, and a train. (No Santa. I wonder why.) So when the variety of shapes increased, Shelly had to start thinking creatively about how to decorate them. Most of her bells, stars, snowmen, and trees are the cookie-cutter (groan intended) creations of her childhood, but I did see some variation. So we're on the right track.

Of course, when Shelly's little sister found out, she gave Shelly a piece of her mind.