If you are longing for the good old days this Holiday Season, you can recreate them easily and inexpensively. Here is a recipe for old-school, 1950s-style Holiday cookies to give as gifts or to serve at parties. They are easy to make and inexpensive, especially when compared to the price of packaged cookies and bakery sweets this year. All you need is a pinch of creativity, a sprinkle of time spent thrift store shopping, and a desire to walk down memory lane and recreate an old-fashioned Holiday spirit. 
This delicious vintage simple sugar cookie recipe is thoroughly 1950s. Here’s how to bake them:
Sugar Cookie Ingredients: 4 cups sifted cake flour 2 1/2 tsp. baking power, 1/2 tsp salt, 2/3 cup soft shortening,1 1/’2 cups granulated sugar, 2 eggs, 1 tsp. vanilla extract, 4 tsp. milk.
Sift together flour baking power, and salt. Mix shortening, sugar, eggs, and vanilla until creamy. Mix in flour mixture alternately with milk. Chill dough thoroughly (you can hurry this step up by placing in the freezer). While the cookies and you both chill, heat your oven to 400. When cool enough,roll the dough out on a lightly floured surface with a floured rolling pin. Work on one-half or one-third the dough at a time. With lightly floured cutter or cardboard pattern, cut your cookie into a Holiday pattern. Place the cut-out cookie on a lightly greased cookie sheet, leaving them approx. 1/2 - 1" apart. Bake for 9 minutes or until golden brown. This recipe makes about 6 dozen cookies.
How to decorate & design: Frosting: I remember fondly the frosted and decorated Holiday cookies I received as a child. Here’s an easy-to-make frosting recipe. You will need a 1-lb package of confectioner’ sugar, 1/2 tsp cream of tartar, 3 egg whites, unbeaten, and /2 tsp of vanilla extract. Sift together sugar and cream of tartar, adding the egg whites and vanilla. At high speed on your mixer, beat the the mixture until so stiff a knife drawn through leaves a clear path. Frost your cookies in a cake decorator tube or spread gently with a knife. This ornamental, 1950s-style frosting may be divided, and tinted in different colors. You can now add your own designs with sprinkles, little red candy dots, coconut, etc. When frosting, you can also use decorator tubes (just imagine how you can gussy-up a cookie wreath!)
Now, here’s how you design these Holiday cookies with your own creative skills. I own a collection of vintage 1950’s cookie cutters, which I use to make fun vintage-style Holiday cookies (Santa, Angels,Candy Canes, pumpkins and turkeys). These cutters can be found in both metal and plastic (as shown). In the 1950s, home-bakers suggested you create your own designs out of cardboard and use that design to craft your cookie dough. You can create cookies for Halloween, Thanksgiving, birthdays and so on. Cookies are so versatile!
If you don’t have vintage cookie cutters in your pantry, or you are not eager to craft cardboard, you can some times find vintage cookie cutters at thrift stores or on-line on an auction site like eBay. If you’re thrifting for them, also check out the packages and tins you can find this time of year in any thrift store’s Holiday section (they all have crowded Holiday areas, full of discarded wreaths, old and new tree ornaments, an the like ). In this section, you may find a large numbers of vintage and newer tins, generally priced inexpensively for $1 or $2. Wrap your cookies up in red or green tissue and present them in a tin, preferably a vintage one to continue your 1950s theme. 
If you’re somewhat daring, you can also use this cookie recipe to make tree ornaments or package wrapping (just as they did in the 1950s). Simply poke a small hole in the dough before baking a cookie. Place a single dry bean in the cookie hole while you are bake. Remove the bean when the cookies are done and you will have a little round hole, perfect for hanging on the tree with a wire hanger or by a ribbon to dress up your gift wrap.
You can spend a long time decorating these cookies (a la Ace of Cakes) - or you can whip them out quickly and serve and eat them plain and simple. The lovely idea is this year, you’ve made cookies from scratch (not grocery-store refrigerator dough) and from your heart, a great way to gift these days.
Note: As a collector of retro and vintage items, nothing delights me more than finding vintage cooking utensils and items I can use today to recreate the good old days. These cookies are as delicious today as they were back in the Mad Men era. This recipe and the cookie photos were suggested and provided by Good Housekeeping,1958.
