Gingerbread Man Cookie Ornaments

This December I became a bit concerned about how to decorate the Christmas tree because we have a large collection of glass ornaments. And now that Naomi is a toddler, and that she gets into EVERYTHING, I feared for her safety with a tree full of glass ornaments and I did not like the idea of only decorating half the tree. Instead I opted for something we could decorate with while also involving Naomi with the process, and gingerbread man cookies came to the rescue.

When I was young I would make Christmas decorations with gingerbread. The decorations always smelled so good and looked so festive, so it seemed like a good idea for this year.

I adapted the Honey-Spice Gingerbread Cookie recipe from this December's Martha Stewart Living magazine to meet Naomi's dietary needs by removing the dairy and tree nut ingredients and substituting palm oil shortening.

The recipe calls for a lot of steps in the rolling out phase, which I did not do for the sake of saving some time. The cookies still cut well and kept their shape, so if you try this recipe you may also want to do this to cut your time down some.

Naomi loved icing the cookies and really loves to eat the cookies.  Some mornings the first thing she does is walk up to the tree and take a cookie down for a bite or two.  So some of the poor gingerbread man cookies have little bites taken out of them...