Christmas Cookies Past

Many families with Italian roots celebrate Christmas eve with an ethnic tradition known as the feast of the seven fishes. It was not a tradition we adopted in my Italian family. The Christmas season memory I have been processing and remembering the most this year is more like the feast of the seven cookies. I have posted elsewhere about my mom's cookie baking prowess as it manifested itself at our wedding cookie table. Her Christmas cookies were even better. My mom mustered her considerable artistic skill and her characteristic attention to detail to create dozens and dozens of cookies that could comfortably have appeared in a Martha Stewart magazine. Does anyone make cut-out cookies anymore?
I remember four particular designs that came out at Christmas - candy cane, Christmas tree, wreath and Santa Claus. She made dough in both dark gingerbread and white vanilla flavor.   She decorated those cutouts in ways that I can still see in my mind.  In the hundreds of family photos we have, there don't seem to be any pictures of these holiday delicacies.  
She dyed the icing, so that Santa's hat was red, his beard was white (and coconut on top of white icing made the 'hair' on his beard). She painted the Christmas tree and wreath designs with green icing, adding red candies as berries on the wreath and metallic looking candies as ornaments on the tree. On the candy cane, she alternated white and red icing.
Then there were the rum balls, iced anise cookies and pizzelles (chocolate and anise flavored). She boxed and plated her handiwork in a beautiful presentation and they became gifts to be offered to family and neighbors. And oh, yes for our eating pleasure at home too!  
She had a kind of cookie exchange going with my Aunt Gilda, who was also a master cookie baker.  Hers were different.  She did the roll out dough and made the horn shaped cookies stuffed with nuts or apricots. 
This Christmas I am trying to have these memories suffice.  I did not inherit the baking gene and yes, I know those carb and sugar laden delights are not good for me and they were not good for my mom either. 
So I am eating them this year in my mind only.  For sure by Christmas Day, we'll have a few (dozen) that will only be a unreasonable facsimile of what I grew up with.  And I keep telling myself this holiday season, "sugar is poison", "sugar is poison".  It's not working particularly well.