cookies,cookies,cookies!!

Well this passed Saturday Jerry and I decided to make Christmas cookies..this has become a tradition with us for about the last 5 years..and in the last 5 years we have only screwed up 1 batch of cookies..until NOW!!! We decided to try out some new recipes... so we made all this dough..sugar, lemon and ginger bread...we doubled the recipe so we could split the cookies up. All the dough had to be refrigerated for a couple of hours...oh I forgot to mention that I got a new "Kitchen Aid Mixer" for an early Christmas present from my parents & Vivian (it is wonderful).. so with my new mixer we were flying through making the dough..we made sure all the ingredients were measured out right and put in..but something went terribly WRONG!! When it was time to roll out the lemon dough it was all crumbly and flaky!! So we thought.. OK we will just throw this in the trash..and try to make it again..we weren't sure what we had done wrong. So we decided to work on the sugar cookies..and wouldn't ya know the same thing had happen to this dough..so it ended up in the trash too!! At this point it had been about 4 hours since we had started making cookies...and all we had to show for it was 2 things of dough in the trash...I was so frustrated!!:( So we pulled out the gingerbread and crossed our fingers...FINALLY this dough was perfect!! So after 6 hours we had gingerbread man cookies...we decided to call it quits for the day and get together on Monday (we were both off work) and re-try making the other doughs again! So on Monday we were bound and determined to get these doughs right!! Well something we found out that we should not have used the first time was Crisco cooking sticks instead of butter...big NO NO in making cut out cookies. This time we used butter.... it was a success.. the cookies were awesome!! Then we try out these 2 other new cookie recipes..Brown sugar butter cookies & Cherry tea cookies! They turned out great..so now our confidence is re-stored in baking!! Thank God!!! We ran out of time on Monday so we got together on Tuesday after work and finished up on all the baking...and now on Thursday we are going to decorate the cut outs...what a job this has become!! I will post the finish decorated cookies and pics on Thursday!!