Do you work all day and come home to the same busyness of every day with all the holiday prep piled on top? Do you stay at home with one, two, three...(you get the idea) little children who are under foot and need Mommy's help and attention. Are you lucky to get one batch of cookies made, let alone a variety for Christmas?
Me too!
The natural solution in my mind was a cookie exchange, but that is too much work too... or is it. We just did a cookie swap for the moms who send their kids to UBCS Day Care. Here are some easy tips to put together a cookie swap that takes very little time and effort.
- Host the exchange with out getting together. You can do this by collecting cookies, dividing them out, and handing them back out. While this takes a little work on the part of a couple of people who organize the exchange, it is well worth it and really doesn't take all that long if you find the common threads in all of your lives. We had the moms drop the cookies off when they brought their children to day care Wednesday morning. Today (Friday) they will pick their cookies up and take them home. There are other simple ways to do a swap. If you know how many people are participating have everyone divide their cookies into that many ziploc bags and everyone takes a bag from each person at church or where every you see eachother. The sky is the limit! Think outside the box.
- Keep your cookie amount reasonable and unchanging. We did 5-6 dozen cookies each for an exchange of about 20 ladies. For a smaller group we did simply what one batch of your cookies yields.
- Have everyone bring their cookies in a disposable container - they won't get it back! And they also need to send an empty tray or large tin to take the cookies home in.
- Give a time buffer - if the moms forgot the cookies on Wednesday, they could bring them in Thursday.
- Be creative and have fun! There are lots of ideas out there, so do your research!
Have you participated in a cookie exchange? What things did you notice that made your exchange a success?
