December is the month that everyone seems to make gingerbread, and I guess you can only go so far with the variation on the basic recipe (though you can put gingerbread into all kinds of shapes - person, house, etc). But this recipe from the late author Laurie Colwin adds a little zip.

Along with the usual spices and butter and molasses, the recipe also calls for 2 teaspoons of lemon brandy. You can substitute vanilla extract for the lemon brandy, but what's the fun in that?

I'd rather devote my holiday prep time to decorating cookies and wrapping gifts, but I still have a deep appreciation of the incredible amount of work that goes into making a prize-winning gingerbread house. Even if that house won a ribbon at the local school holiday bake sale and not at a national competition. The above gingerbread house, found via the lollypix blog, won the grand prize at the national gingerbread house competition in Florida (you can peek inside here) this year.

I'll stick with cookies, but read on for a few more houses.

I'm usually on the lookout for new gingerbread cookie cutters around the holidays and have yet to find a set that I like, largely because the gingerbread people turn out too large. I have one cookie cutter that is probably 10 inches long and is accompanied by a matching snowman cutter. Who wants a gingerbread cookie that big - not to mention the fact that it is a pain to bake enormous cookies because of the increased risk of over/underbaking. This year I came across this set of Gingerbread Family Cookie Cutters, which includes six reasonably-sized cutters (gingerbread man, woman , boy, girl, dog and house), all packed in a small house-shaped tin. In addition to not being inconveniently oversized, the cutters provide more options than a singleton gingerbread man cookie cutter would. It's $13 for the whole set.

Besides - baking your own will be far more fun and a lot less expensive than buying the pre-made cookies individually. If you're really not into baking, however, it might be a good idea to opt for some gingerbread cookie ornaments, which will last much longer.

Making a full-fledged gingerbread house is fun, but it's also a lot of work for something that probably isn't going to be eaten. If you're entering your house into a contest that's one thing, but otherwise, why not make some that that's as enjoyable to eat as it is to look at? Four Weeks Magazine has a great how-to for making Gingerbread House Cupcake with Chocolate Ganache Filling. The cupcakes are baked up and then paired off. In each pair, one is carved into the "roof" and one is left as the base (scraps are eaten, of course!). Filling is added to the base, acting as a "glue" to hold the building together, then the little house can be decorated any way you see fit. If you have kids around the house at the holidays, decorating these is a great idea for them. And you can use chocolate cupcakes if they aren't fans of gingerbread.

[Thanks, Gabrielle!]

I don't know that I would have occurred to me to use some of the presentation tricks that Heidi, of 101 Cookbooks, used for her Gingerbread Man Cookies, but I'm glad that I've seen them now. A must-have on any holiday cookie plate, gingerbread men are fun to make, fun to decorate and, as long as you choose a good recipe to start with, fun to eat. Heidi said that she revamped her standard recipe this year to use white whole wheat flour and less refined sugar, instead opting to sweeten her cookies with a coarser natural cane sugar and molasses. The cookies are spicy, but sturdy, so they can hold up to decoration. Again, instead of going with a frosting that would use refined sugar, she simply sprinkled the cookies with very coarse grained natural sugar (turbinado). The giant crystals add a sparkle, a crunch and are a nice change of pace from cookies decorated with royal icing. Her motivation for using the stick was presentation: the cookies can be stood up in a container or small flower pot filled with sugar, which looks a lot more dramatic than laying them out on a serving platter.

If you order a dozen or so holiday cookies from a bakery, you don't expect them to be piled up on a plate and covered in saran wrap, although this seems to be a perfectly acceptable presentation for gifts of homemade cookies. It's true that it is the thought that counts and that good cookies will over come any packaging, but it doesn't take that much more effort to take that packaging to a new level, which will keep the cookies fresher and make a homemade gift a showstopper.

This week, along with their collection of eight great holiday cookie recipes that are all going to be a bit more impressive than your average batch of chocolate chips, including Coconut Orange Macaroons, Scottish Shortbread, Ginger Drops and Candy Cane Cookies, the Denver Post has some great tips for packaging. For kids, try packing up "blank" gingerbread cookies in a small toolbox with frosting, sprinkles and other things they can use to customize the cookies. For cookies that will long outlast the holiday season, giving an unbaked roll of cookie dough (choose an attractive one, like the Chocolate-Coconut Pinwheels the article includes) and baking instructions wrapped up in an elegant tube that will put any store-bought dough to shame. And for the baker, consider wrapping the treats up in or on a pan, so they'll have something to use when they want to bake a batch themselves.

Gingerbread men are a bit of a hassle to bake. Mixing up the dough is not the problem and neither is decorating the cooled cookies or eating them. They annoying thing about the cookies is that the dough has to be chilled, rolled out, cut and rerolled before the cookies can even be baked. It is time consuming and, when you consider that you could have made at least a batch or two of chocolate chip cookies in the mean time, it doesn't always seem worth the effort. But there is no denying that the cookies are cute. Fortunately, Wilton makes a gingerbread man pan that can be used to bake little cakes, muffins, brownies and even mold rice crispy treats into gingerbread men. It is much faster than working with the cut-out cookies and you can still have fun decorating them. One additional bonus is that the cake pan gives you an easy alternative to cookies when the holidays tend to be cookie-heavy as far as desserts go.

The Pumpkin Spice drinks might the most popular seasonal beverages - hot or cold - at Starbucks and there are more than a few people who mark their calendars with the release date every fall, but their two more Christmas-y drinks - the gingerbread and the eggnog lattes - deserve their time in the spotlight, too. Especially since those flavors are popping up at other coffee houses. The gingerbread latte is made with a spicy gingerbread syrup that is blended into a regular latte and topped, if desired, with whipped cream. The eggnog latte is a bit different and is made with real eggnog, which is mixed with a bit of regular milk (whole, nonfat, etc) and steamed as usual. You might not expect eggnog and coffee to go well together, but the combination is actually quite good. Especially if you know a barista that will a little something "extra" to the eggnog lattes on Christmas Eve (not that that would ever happen or anything...).

Gingerbread is my favorite, as the spices are both warming and satisfying. Which do you prefer - or do you skip those typically seasonal flavors in favor of the peppermint mocha?

Gingerbread houses are fun to make but because they require very hard, sturdy cookies that will hold up to several weeks of display, they are not necessarily the dough used to make them will probably not produce the tastiest holiday cookies that you'll have. If you bake smaller gingerbread cookies, you can get a better consistency and flavor, but you have to give up on the idea of having a three-dimensional cookie showpiece. Unless you use the holiday storybook cookie cutters from Williams-Sonoma, of course. These cookie cutters give you the chance to play with your food without having to worry about finding a recipe will produce a sturdy enough cookie to support the weight of a whole house. They have notches on the pieces so that after they are baked, the cookies can be fit together to form three-dimensional holiday shapes. The 8-piece set allows you to create a perfectly seasonal scene on a small, managable scale and the cookies can still be stored in an airtight container if you want to keep them fresh.

Brownie sundaes are so incredibly good, but don’t you feel just a wee bit kindergarten when you serve it as a dessert after an ooh-la-la dinner?

Yeah, me neither. It’s a brownie sundae for God’s sake.

But still, changing it up a little with a slightly less sweet gingerbread in place of the brownie and topping your vanilla ice cream with pineapple rum sauce instead of hot fudge feels a little more grown up. Just keep the aerosol can of whipped cream and those horrible red vinyl things called “cherries” in the fridge until your kid’s birthday party.