Well, you'd done it again. You procrastinated on something, and you were paying the price. As the holidays drew ever nearer, your teacher had promised the class a holiday party, provided everyone brought something in to share. You'd wound up with cookies. Had you told your dad about this on the day that you got the assignment? Nooooo.

So here you were. In the kitchen. Frantically mixing together cookie ingredients and making one hell of a mess as your father attempted to cut cookies from the dough. Simple sugar cookies were what the two of you had decided on when you finally told him about your time crunch. Simple enough, right? Right? Wrong.

The batter kept sticking to the rolling pin. So you put flour on the pin and on the wax paper beneath the dough and on the dough itself. It worked, but at the cost of drying out the dough. So that was a problem. Then there were the cookie cutters themselves. They came in fun shapes! Angels, candy canes, trees, stars, gingerbread men, snowmen, all sorts of cute options! But they kept tearing. The candy cane was a particularly heinous offender, tearing at the crook of the cane seemingly every time. Every time!

You threw a batch of cookies into the oven, shut the door, and turned to face your dad as another candy cane tore. One swear and a stellar pitch of cookie cutter into sink later, Alec turned to you with a helpless look on his face.

"How many of these do ye need again? We have to be almost done.*

Not so. You still had to decorate the cookies. You weren't even sure if you had cookie-decorating supplies.