WHILE THE FRENCH finish Christmas dinner with a bûche de Noël and the English with a steamed pudding, Americans hold fast to our all-consuming national love of cookies. Come December, the sprinkles and sparkles come out, and we set aside entire days for holiday baking. The result might be sugar cookies in the shape of snowflakes or perhaps it’s a tin of thumbprints filled with jam, tied with a big ribbon and sent off to friends and family. Part of the pleasure is in doing and making and eating the exact same thing we’ve always done, made and eaten. 

But what if this year we went big—in actual size as well as flavor? Instead of painstakingly rolling out dough and cutting dozens upon dozens of perfectly shaped cookies of prudent proportions, let’s make giant ones, 9 inches across, designed to surprise, delight and then to share. Let’s turn sugar cookies into massive maple sugar cookies and molasses cookies into vast chewy chai molasses cookies. And really, why drink eggnog when we can eat it, in super-sized shortbread form?