When I walked in the door this evening my house smelled like maple. I spent all day rolling, cutting, decorating and baking batches of Smitten Kitchen’s Nutmeg Maple Butter Cookies. I have to say that this cookie is my favorite variation on a classic Christmas sugar cookie. The dough handles perfectly (Is it the egg yolk that keeps it from drying out or getting too stiff?). And they taste fabulous. Deb makes hers austere, but when I make them I tart them up with colored sugar because, you know, when I make them they are Christmas cookies.

Here’s a secret to Dimmick rolled cookies (You may never look at cookies quite the same way again). My mother taught me to use a sequence of cutters: when the dough is untouched, when it has been chilling in the refrigerator and you pull your first quarter or eighth of dough out to roll, you select the cutters you are going to use. I like to start with six-pointed stars and Christmas trees. Then you use only those cutters every time you select a fresh round of dough. When you roll up the scraps and roll them out, you choose entirely different cutters: I chose a flower that I think of as a poinsettia, but could be a Christmas rose. All second-generation dough (aka re-rolls) is cut with this cutter. And if, God forbid, you have a third generation of dough made from twice re-rolled scraps, you choose yet another cutter.

Why do we do this? The first time you roll out dough it has minimal added flour on your work surface. The cookies that you get from a first dough are more tender and flavorful. By the time you are re-rolling dough, you have incorporated the flour that is on your work surface and you usually have to add a bit more flour when you roll it out so that it does not stick, so second and third-generation cookies have more flour in them and the dough gets worked more: both of those things toughen the cookies slightly. The compensation is that the re-rolled dough is usually a bit easier to work with due to the added flour and sometimes you can get the stiffer cookies quite thin. The second generation cookies may look better than the first generation ones, but the first ones taste better. Switching cutters functions as a code. You can say to those in the know, “The poinsettias are re-rolls,” while you make them attractive for others to grab.

My mother favored delicate, thin cookies and I share that preference. I tend to use small, angular cutters with unfussy shapes. My favorite cutters are just an outline of the shape, as opposed to the kind that have a flat top and a sharp cutting edge — cookies tend to get stuck in overly fancy cutters. I don’t make gingerbread men, although I have the cutters to make them.

As I was throwing red sugar onto the maple poinsettias, I realized that I would run out of red sugar before I had baked all of the ginger cookies (which I haven’t started yet). I also saw that I did not have enough powdered sugar to make royal icing for the pfefferneusse — that recipe makes a lot.

When you make cookies hour after hour by yourself, you get into a rhythm. Take a butter wrapper and use it to grease a baking sheet. Set that on the counter. Add flour to your work surface: I use a silicone mat over a marble slab. Pat the dough into a round as you would for pie crust. Flour your rolling pin. Roll out the dough as thinly as possible. I usually end up with one thick end on the top and am running out of room to roll, so I will break the thick part off and set it aside — it is just like new dough because I haven’t finished rolling it.

Choose your cutters and flour them. Place the cutter as close to the edge of the dough as you can. Then place the next cutter as close to the last place you cut as you can. After awhile, you start to see “If I turn the tree cutter right side up here and upside down there” I can cut very close together.” I imagine someone laying out paper patterns on fabric. I don’t think of myself as having strong spacial abilities, but I am good at placing cookie cutters, probably because I’ve done it a lot.

Pop the filled cookie sheet in the refrigerator to chill while you fill the next one. Transfer the chilled sheet to your work table for decorating. When all your trays are full of cut cookies, preheat the oven. Decorate the cookies while it preheats.

As I cut cookies, I move the scraps off to the side of the marble slab — I will gather them up to re-roll later. Mom sometimes made “scrap cookies” of the odd bits of dough between cookies. I prefer to re-roll the scraps and make cookies with recognizable shapes.

Suddenly I remember the family lexicon: members of my immediate family talked about “crap cookies,” not because there was anything wrong with the Christmas cookies we looked forward to all year but because my younger brother couldn’t say esses when he was little. “Scrap cookies” became “crap cookies.”

Before I decorated the last round of poinsettias, my phone rang. My former next door neighbor from Oberlin Avenue who is one hundred years old now was calling to wish me a merry Christmas. I was touched. I asked her if she would be going out to visit her daughter for Christmas. She was, but she wanted to see if I was home first. I told her I was baking cookies, that that had been one of Madge’s specialties and that I still baked them. She said she’d check up on me from time to time and I told her I had never forgotten how she sent us food when my mother was so ill.

While cookies bake, I mix up new batches of colored sugar. I’ve made light green, turquoise, denim blue, orange and an accidental brown — no matter what the package says you cannot make purple sugar with cheap liquid food coloring.

I do not set a timer. When the cookies are ready I will catch their scent wafting through the air. When cookies smell like cookies they are done.

I baked the last tray of cookies, washed my silicone mat and forced myself out of the house for a Safeway run. Safeway was out of red sugar, but I got powdered sugar and a few treats (coffee yogurt and tapioca pudding) and the thyme leaves I have been eying, outrageously priced at nine dollars, but 33% off this week. The walk stretched out my back a little, compressed from all the standing and sitting.

I fed the cat, had dinner myself (bagel, peanut butter, yogurt, raw carrots) and realized I wasn’t up for a second shift. The ginger dough is the hardest one to handle. Stay tuned.