187 christmas cookie recipes

Delicate butter cookies studded with ground pistachios, shaped into little fingers, and dusted with powdered sugar for melt-in-your-mouth holiday treats.

Use your favorite cookie cutters to create these delicious and interesting shaped cookies!

This co-winner in the filled-cookie category from Dorothy O'Neill of Whitefish Bay makes a delicate, crispy cookie. Dipping in chocolate and nuts adds flavor and texture.

Pat Korth of Muskego offered a coconut variation on the peanut butter kiss cookie.

Virginia Lane of Cudahy secured this recipe, with its nice complexity of flavors, in the late '50s or '60s when she lived in Iran.

Chocolate cookies, rolled in powdered sugar with a Hershey's kiss in the center.

These raspberry almond bars are not only good during Christmas...

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.

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

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

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.

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.