When you’re blessed (or cursed) enough to attend several cookie exchanges each holiday season, you start to notice patterns. There’s always some Nara Smith wannabe who smugly shows up with some Pinterest bullshit that, if you attempted yourself, would land you getting mocked by Nicole Byer on Nailed It!. Conversely, you have your friends who didn’t really want to participate in this to begin with and try to pass off those immediately recognizable grocery store sugar cookies as homemade by throwing them in some Tupperware.
Each cookie represents a unique psyche. I’m like the dude from Mindhunter, getting inside the heads of each cookie dealer. Walk with me to find out if I think there’s going to be a troubling Netflix documentary made about you one day.
1200-Calorie Jimmy Fallon Crumbl Holiday Cookie Brownie
If you’re purchasing Crumbl’s monstrosity of a “cookie,” you’re a hype beast who feeds off of drop culture. You don’t really care what exactly is being dropped as long as it’s exclusive. You’re embarrassed to have a section of your closet hiding your old Supreme accessories, and last week, you were willing to put bitches in the ground to get your hands on the SKIMS x NorthFace collab. You spent $750 on a beige ski outfit, and you don’t even ski.
Pillsbury Ready-To-Bake Christmas Tree Cookies
You’re lazy. You Postmates lunch from restaurants that are 0.3 miles away from your apartment. You have a water bottle that says, “Shopping is my cardio.” You cancel on your friends 30 minutes before you’re supposed to meet up with gay abandon. You shamelessly use ChatGPT to write break-up texts to your situationships.
Sugar Wood Naughty Gingerbread Cookies
Honey, he can frost my cookie any day! When you roll up to your church’s cookie exchange with these sexually explicit gingerbread people, you’re looking for a reaction. Sexual innuendos are your first language, you pick fights with internet trolls, you still use Rent The Runway in 2024, and you’re convinced you could be the next Nikki Glaser if you simply “had the time” to put together a five-minute open mic set.
Candy Cane Joe-Joe’s
A hoe for Joe, you’ve been strategizing your TJ’s seasonal goodies plan since August. You’re likely one of several siblings, which is why you have a scarcity mindset and pile seventeen boxes of the Candy Cane Joe-Joe’s into your cart to sustain you through the entire holiday season and then some. When you go out to eat with your friends, you take control of the vision for the meal and serve as the group representative with the waiter. Everyone happily lets you do so since you’re the one who miraculously snagged the table at one of Taylor Swift’s favorite eateries through aggressive bartering on ResX.
Homemade Linzer Cookies
You fancy yourself a Rory Gilmore type, and while you obnoxiously still have the same metabolism that you did when you took A.P. English eleven years ago, you’ve also been “reading” the same copy of Intermezzo on the train for the past three months. You force your friends and family to indulge in your painfully twee DIY holiday gifts, like dream catchers that look like a nine-year-old made them. At the same time, your own wish list is filled with classically commercial tomfoolery like the Rhode peptide lip tint or those Amalfi Coast coffee table books that every other TikTok girlie proudly displays.
Tate’s Bake Shop Peppermint Cookie Bark
Housing a bag of cookie bark is the socially acceptable version of bumping a line in your mom’s kitchen. You have an addictive personality, and you always have. When you were a kid, you spent all your allowance money on upgrades to your Club Penguin igloo. As an adult, you’ve been banned from Klarna. Get help!
