IT'S JUST A COOKIE

For last year's winter holidays I decided I was going to do things up brown. Or green and red, as the case may have been. That meant, among other things, baking and icing ginger cookies for my Christmas tree. I managed the baking part, but when I got to the icing---well, it takes forever to paint on all those little stripes and buttons and eyes and noses and mouths. And I was meeting a work deadline. So I came up with what I thought would be the perfect solution: mix up one large batch of red icing and paint all the cookies that one color. No one would notice the difference, right?

Onto the tree they went. Looks great, you think? Sadly, this perfectionist of an artist DID notice the difference. Those monochromatic cookies stuck out like an entire orchestra of sore thumbs (pardon my melange of metaphors). All that night I tossed and turned. My tree did not look right. I was in agony. 

By morning, I had bowed to the inevitable. I would ice my cookies over again. Off the tree they came. I mixed up icing, but this time in multiple colors. I iced...and iced...and iced...

Back onto the tree they went. Ahhh! Success! My perfectionist heart was satisfied. And the unfortunate moral of this story? It doesn't matter to me whether I'm working on a commissioned piece of art, or on "just a cookie": it has to be perfect.