Back during October, our Tuesday night group did a "mission project" night. I have no idea why this first picture is so blurry!! After dinner, we cleaned up and quickly set up several stations. The dining room table was the "write a note to a shut-in" table. This group worked so hard writing notes to all of the homebound/nursing home/shut-ins at Trinity. This was a simple project to get together and those who received the cards were thrilled.
We also had a cooking baking station . . .these were the pre-packaged kind of cookies - "put on a cookie sheet and bake cookies." One of the guys handled this project.
Prior to the actual night, I had mixed up several recipes of Grandmother's recipe (Mark's mom) for homemade sugar cookies and had used my cookie cutters to cut out shapes and had baked them. My kitchen is just not big enough to do all the baking on one night. The kitchen table became the cookie decorating station. I had a brilliant idea (if I do say so myself!!). I put down a plastic tablecloth for them to decorate on. We spread all of the finished cookies out over the table at the end of the night and placed several tall glasses on the table - on the corners and in the middle. Then we placed another new and clean plastic tablecloth over the top. The icing wasn't dry so we couldn't "cover" them and/or "layer" them in the plastic containers yet but the cookies didn't need to sit out exposed all night. The next morning, I packed all the cookies into the containers and rolled up the tablecloths with all the icing smears and extra sprinkles and clean up was done!!
Here is a picture of Matt wearing his oven mitt . . .while baking those cookies. Looks like Drew and Mark are offering moral support.
We had some excellent cookie decorators. Some of the girls are expert bakers themselves. Lydia is a superb decorator.
This black kitty cat was one of Lydia's creations.
Looks like Mark is supervising in this picture! Seems like he had given up sugar and wasn't eating cookies!! These are one of his favorite cookies!! Just what did we do with all these cookies anyway? Well . . .our Sunday school class feeds people on the fourth Wednesday of every month. On the odd months, we feed the men at the firehouse shelter and on the even months, we feed mostly children/youth at another ministry. We made a cookie bag tied with black and orange ribbon for each child. Just typing those words makes me kind of "tear up." I heard that the children had great big smiles when they received their pretty bags of cookies. We take those things for granted. I live in an "over the mountain" community. Yes, that is what it is called. I didn't grow up in an "over the mountain" community. I remember hearing about those folks. We take things for granted like pretty goody bags for holidays and fancy decorated cookies. Some children have never even had a homemade cookie in their life much less a fancy decorated one. Now some of you might be thinking - well, Lisa - that is stupid. You should be feeding the hungry a meal - not some stupid fancy cookie. But you know what? Maybe a fancy cookie is just what someone needed. Maybe someone needed to know that someone somewhere loved Jesus enough to take time to bake a whole lot of cookies and then spend time decorating the cookies JUST FOR THEM. I believe that I might be standing on a soapbox.
So it was a great night - three stations - note writing, cookie baking and cookie decorating . . .fun and fellowship and doing something for someone else = ingredients for a really good night!!
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