The BEST Christmas Cookie Recipes

It’s that time of year again; time to break out all our favorite Christmas Cookie Recipes! We’ve gathered a list of our all time favorite Christmas Cookie recipes that are perfect for gifting and sharing with loved ones!

Sugar Cookies and Butter Cookies

• Gingerbread Spiced Snowflake Cookies are one of our favorite Christmas cookies! They’re loaded with our homemade German Gingerbread Spice mix (lebkuchen), making them pleasantly aromatic and so delicious. These unique gingerbread cookies are truly special, taste like they were made just for the holidays and make perfect, edible holiday gifts! The dusting of powder sugar is totally optional! It makes the cookies ever more beautiful, but it’s not necessary. We love the adorable snowflake shapes, but you can also turn these into cute gingerbread men cookies! They’re a great, lighter alternative because these don’t contain molasses!

• Our Meyer Lemon Meltaways are one of our favorite Christmas cookie recipes! The cookies are truly melt in your mouth delicious. They’re easy to make and so beautiful too. These are our go-to Christmas cookies to bring for almost any cookie exchange and almost always one of the first ones to disappear. The bright flavor of the Meyer lemon really comes through and it’s our favorite part of these cookies!

• Our Snickerdoodles are one of our favorites! They’re a classic holiday cookie that we find ourselves making every year! They’re so simple to make and our sugar cookie dough requires zero chill time, so the cookies are ready to be baked right away! While the cookies bake, the scent of cinnamon-sugar makes its way through the entire house and totally gets us in the holiday mood!

• These Pain d’ Amande or Almond Thin Cookies are so good! They’re “eat the entire batch yourself” good. This Christmas cookie recipe yields light, crispy and extremely addicting treats. We love packing them up for loved ones alongside a small tin of our favorite coffee beans or tea leaves; the perfect little holiday package!

• Our Poppy Seed and Lemon Cookies are for the lemon lover in your life. The tiny bits of crunch from the poppy seeds are a pleasant texture contrast to these sweet, tart and chewy cookies. We love these delicious cookies so much!

• Our White Chocolate Dipped Butter Cookies are like little palettes of edible art. They’re beautiful, sweet, buttery, and also versatile (they’re reminiscent of shortbread cookies, but a little different). We topped ours with freeze dried strawberries, crushed pistachios and thin strips of candied citrus, but you can decorate them however you like – maybe even get some festive colored sprinkles in there, crushed peppermint or some candied ginger? Your friends and family will be so excited to receive these beautiful Christmas cookies!

• These Floral Pressed Butter Cookies are beautiful cookies and make such lovely edible holiday gifts. They’re a lot easier to make than they look, and make such impressive gifts that anyone would be lucky to receive this holiday season!

Stuffed Cookies and Sandwich Cookies

• Marshmallow Stuffed S’mores Cookies are so easy to make and especially delicious. There’s something so satisfying about breaking this cookie in half to reveal the soft and gooey marshmallow center. Another Christmas cookie recipe that doubles as a fantastic year-round cookie!

• Baci Di Dama which translates to “lady kisses” (since the cookies look like two lips ready to give a kiss) are so good! They’re sweet, nutty and have the perfect amount of chocolate pressed into the center. We love scooping a bunch of these Christmas cookies into little gift bags and giving them to neighbors for the holidays.

• We love food mashups and these Peanut Butter and Jelly, Potato Chip Thumbprint Cookies do not disappoint! They’re sweet, salty, fun, and delicious! This unique Christmas cookie recipe is so fun and the nostalgic flavors take you right back to your childhood! We stuff ours with raspberry jam, but use whatever you have on hand or whichever jam is your favorite flavor!

• We love these Oatmeal Chocolate Chip Sandwich Cookies. You get the chewy goodness of an oatmeal cookie, but we’ve swapped the raisins (just not a fan!) out for chocolate chips! We’ve sandwiched them with creamy, vanilla frosting to give them an old school Little Debbie oatmeal creme pie vibe. So good!

• We have another fun mashup for you guys with our Salted Twix Cookies! We’ve basically turned one of our favorite childhood candy bars and turned them into Christmas cookies! They’re so decadent and delicious and make perfect edible holiday gifts!

• Our Peanut Butter Stuffed Chocolate Cookies are super decadent and delicious. It combines the classic combination of peanut butter and chocolate, but takes it one step further with an extra dip in melted white chocolate at the end and light sprinkle of dry roasted peanuts, for texture. If you have a peanut butter chocolate lover in your life, this holiday cookie is for them!

• Salted Caramel Almond Thumbprint Cookies are one of the first cookies we ever put up on our site. They’re slightly crisp and nutty, with an oozing salted caramel center. The contrasting textures from the almonds and the salted caramel is really nice! We love these slightly sophisticated cookies that are easier to make than you would think!

Frosted Cookies

• Soft and Fluffy Strawberry Cookies with Vanilla Frosting are not only festive, but fruit forward and delicious! The freeze-dried strawberries add a more intense real strawberry flavor to these cookies, which we love! They’re just like the name describes, soft and fluffy. If gifting and shipping these fun Christmas cookies we recommend sending the cookies unfrosted, with a jars of frosting and freeze-dried crumb topping on the side for freshness.

• Soft and Fluffy Sugar Cookies with Vanilla Frosting are our version of those addicting Lofthouse sugar cookies, without all the hard to pronounce ingredients. Our version is super soft and fluffy. We made sure not to make the cookie too sweet, so that it’s well balanced with the thick layer of vanilla frosting we’ve slathered on top! The sour cream can also be swapped out with cream cheese or Greek yogurt, for an equally delicious cookie. We love taking the first big bite out of these cookies, they have the best, soft texture!

Cookies with Fruit

• These Blueberry and Cardamom Oat Cookies are another cookie that goes great with coffee or tea. The subtle hint of cardamom make this a delicious Christmas cookie recipe to enjoy throughout the season. We use fresh blueberries, but when they’re not in season, we love using frozen blueberries with equally great results! You can even used dried blueberries (or even dried cranberries) to switch things up!

• Our Blueberry Yogurt Cookies are perfect if you’re looking for a light, soft and fluffy cookie! The blueberries add bursts of a sweet-tart flavor and the Swedish sugar adds some crunch. These cookies are also delicious with coffee or tea. They also pack and travel well, so we highly recommend packing these up and sending them to a loved one this holiday season!

• We have our soft and fluffy Strawberry Shortcake Cookies. These cookies have an almost biscuit texture to them, to mimic the shortcake version. The vanilla glaze makes these cookies extra cute in addition to giving them an extra touch of sweetness.

Cookies with Chocolate

• M&M Cookies are such a classic and we love that you can easily make them festive just by switching up the m&m colors you use! These are very fun gifting cookies as well as great cookies to leave out for santa! :)

• Kitchen Sink Cookies are awesomely ‘over the top‘ in every way. They’re sweet, salty, chewy, crunchy, and filled with so many delicious mix-ins. We love that they can easily be customized to suite anyones preference. They’re such fun Christmas cookie recipe to make, that everyone always loves!

• Do these Salted Gingersnap Mallomars count as cookies? We say YES! They’re one of our favorite holiday treats to make and gift (and eat!). We simplify our recipe by using our favorite store bought gingersnap cookies, so you’re really just making some marshmallow fluff, melting chocolate and dipping. Instead of homemade truffles, we make these mallomars and people go nuts over them!

• Who doesn’t love a warm chocolate chip cookie? Add some nutty brown butter, a sprinkle of sea salt flakes and you have these irresistible Salted Brown Butter Chocolate Chip Cookies. They’re soft and chewy, with a slightly crisp edge and just so so good! We love gifting these Christmas cookies to neighbors, but also always have a batch in our freezers for whenever we have a sweet tooth craving for a cookie or two.

• Chai, Chocolate Chip and Coconut Cookies are the perfect snacking cookie! They’re about the size of silver dollars, are crisp around the edges and so chewy in the center. The bright flavors of chai balance well with the chunks of dark chocolate and the sweet bits of coconut. These are another one of those perfect Christmas cookie recipes we love to have hidden away in the back of our freezer throughout the year for when we’re having a quick cookie craving.

• We love these Mexican Chocolate Earthquake Cookies. They’re crisp around the edges and extra chewy in the middle, like a good earthquake cookie should be! We love this chocolatey Christmas cookie recipe that has just a hint of cinnamon and a kick of cayenne from the Mexican Chocolate melted into the mix!

• Chocolate Chip Rice Krispies Treat Cookies are a mashup of two of our favorite treats, rice krispies treats and chocolate chip cookies. We love the slightly crisp texture the rice krispies provide in contrast to the soft marshmallows. These Christmas cookies are simple, delicious and sturdy so they travel really well!

• These delicious Chocolate Covered Ritz Sandwich Cookies are super easy to make, and a great little project to do with kids! Creamy peanut butter is sandwiched between two buttery Ritz crackers and dipped in milk chocolate, for a truly decadent treat everyone will love.

Sifting through Christmas cookie recipes and deciding which ones we’re going to make, are one of our favorite things about the holiday season. Nothing beats the smell of fresh cookies baking in the oven permeating through the house!

More Delicious Holiday Dessert Recipes You Will Love

We also have other delicious holiday dessert recipes that aren’t cookies, if you’re looking for something a little different. Some of our favorites are:

• French Silk Pie
• Creamy No Bake Peanut Butter Pie
• Mini Citrus Bundt Cakes with Sweet Lemon Glaze
• Apple Cake with Chai Spiced Buttercream
• Pumpkin Cake with Pistachio Glaze
• Caramelized Pear Tart

You might also like our post for The Best Christmas Appetizers or 50+ Gift Ideas for the Holidays!