76 christmas sugar cookie recipes

Holiday fruit bars: a brown sugar shortbread crust topped with a chewy raisin, candied cherry, and lemon-zest filling. Cookie-tin classic for Christmas and gift trays.

Berlinerkranzer are buttery Norwegian Christmas wreath cookies scented with orange, brushed with sugared egg white and trimmed with candied cherry holly berries. A delicate Scandinavian holiday tradition.

Holiday decorating icing whisks powdered sugar with a splash of milk and a drop of flavor extract into a smooth, pipe-able glaze for outlining, flooding, and drizzling Christmas cookies.

Fattigmann is a Norwegian fried pastry cookie flavored with cardamom or cinnamon, twisted into slit diamonds and crisped in lard. A traditional Scandinavian Christmas treat with powdered sugar.

Swiss Leckerli cookies: honey-spiced almond bars with candied citrus peel and kirsch, finished with a hardening sugar glaze. Traditional Basel Christmas market sweet that improves with age.

Jewish rugelach with a flaky cottage cheese dough, apricot jam, cinnamon-sugar, walnuts, and currants rolled into golden crescents. A holiday cookie jar essential for Hanukkah or Christmas.

Mandel-Halbmonde are German almond crescents: buttery shortbread cookies shaped like half-moons, baked pale, then rolled twice in powdered sugar. The kind of melt-in-your-mouth Christmas cookie every German bakery puts on the holiday plate.

Rugelach roll flaky cream cheese dough around apricot preserves, cinnamon-brown-sugar, walnuts, and raisins into bite-sized crescents. A classic Jewish bakery cookie for Hanukkah and Christmas alike.

Linzer Augen are Austria's almond shortbread sandwich cookies: two tender, nutty rounds glued with apricot jam, the top cut with a little window that frames the glistening preserves under a snowfall of powdered sugar. A Christmas cookie tin classic.

Jam kolaches fold a cream cheese pastry dough around a dot of strawberry jam, then bake into tender pillows dusted with powdered sugar. The Czech-American Christmas cookie with a four-ingredient base.

Cucidati, the traditional Sicilian Christmas fig cookies, with a rich filling of figs, raisins, nuts, chocolate and rum wrapped in tender pastry, shaped into slashed horseshoes and dusted with sugar.

Spells & Bells are festive Christmas cookies cut into holiday shapes and deep fried until golden and puffed, then served plain, sugared or glazed. A cream-rich fried dough that's crisp outside and tender within.