422 christmas cookie recipes

Easy elephant ears cookies (palmiers) bake from rolled puff pastry, sugar, and egg wash into crisp golden hearts, dipped in melted chocolate. Four-ingredient bakery-style treats ready in 40 minutes.

Buttery spiced fig thumbprint cookies, tender brown-sugar dough rolled in a crunchy flax-sugar coating and filled with jammy fig preserves. Warm cinnamon and nutmeg make them a standout on the holiday cookie tray.

Frosted spice fruit cookies are old-fashioned molasses-spice rolled cookies loaded with walnuts, golden raisins, and dates, finished with an orange juice glaze. Holiday cookie tin staple.

Melt in your mouth Russian tea cookies with walnuts. Perfect accompaniment for a cup of tea.

Christmas shortbread with just five ingredients: butter, sugar, vanilla, flour, and salt. Shape as bars or wedges, plus four built-in variations including chocolate chip and lemon.

Buttery shortbread cookies studded with spiced mincemeat and finished with sweet vanilla glaze. Festive holiday treats that taste like Christmas in every crumbly bite.

Soft pumpkin cookies loaded with cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg, raisins, and walnuts. A big-batch holiday cookie with warm spice flavor in every cakey bite.

Chocolate diamond cookies with unsweetened chocolate, pecans, and vanilla. A fudgy, brownie-like holiday cookie baked in one pan and cut into festive diamond shapes.

Lighter cranberry apple cookies made with egg whites and skim milk, loaded with fresh fruit, cinnamon, and orange zest. A guilt-free holiday cookie that yields 2 dozen.

Vienna crescent cookies with butter, sugar, flour, and ground almonds or pecans, dusted in powdered sugar. Buttery, melt-in-your-mouth Christmas cookies in 4 ingredients.

Swiss Leckerli cookies: honey-spiced almond bars with candied citrus peel and kirsch, finished with a hardening sugar glaze. Traditional Basel Christmas market sweet that improves with age.

Jewish rugelach with a flaky cottage cheese dough, apricot jam, cinnamon-sugar, walnuts, and currants rolled into golden crescents. A holiday cookie jar essential for Hanukkah or Christmas.

Christmas Lizzies are boozy Southern fruitcake cookies loaded with candied cherries, raisins, dates, pecans, and citrus zest, soaked in whiskey. Make them weeks ahead and drizzle with spirits to age.

These rich chocolate-toffee bars from Mary Lueke of Menasha were our top pick in the bar category.

The crisp, densely chocolaty cookies, with an unusually long baking time, were an annual favorite among the 20-plus recipes that Susan Couchman of Hartland remembers were made each year by her mother, Gloria Kuchler.

Chocolate and caramel give this thumbprint cookie from Kathy T. Preston of Milwaukee a different twist.