On the 21st day of ...

I cannot explain this, but one of the family holiday traditions was pigs. Sugar cookies, dough tinted pink, cut out in the shape of pigs. With blue eyes.

No one has made the pigs in a long time. But a couple of years ago, my sister boxed up the cutters and gave them to me for Christmas.

I decided this was their year.

First though, I had to find some blue eyes. My mother had this container of flat sugar disk sprinkles, in mixed pastel colors, and she painstakingly pulled all the blue dots out.

I went to New York Cake, figuring that a crazy obsessive store would have flat blue sprinkles. I was wrong. They had green, and they had a mixture of yellow, black and blue. So I got the yellow, black and blue and painstakingly sorted out enough blue for pigs' eyes.

The dough is always a plain sugar cookie from the original New York Times cookbook, with a healthy dollop of food coloring. Because the recipes includes a quarter cup of milk, it's best to add the color to the milk - it disperses into the dough better. There is something ineffably lovely about dropping food coloring into milk. It blooms into a sort of flower.

Today I rolled and cut the pigs. The girl placed the eyes.

A box of them is going to family Christmas tomorrow. They've been missed.