Christmas just isn't Christmas without baked treats.

Believe it or not, the word cookie came from the Dutch, meaning "little cake."In addition to being made popular by the American Dutch, who brought over the holiday treats in the early 17th century, the British also started to indulge in baked treats, as they traditionally use them in their daily tea service.Although a large majority of Christmas cookie recipes are normally sugar biscuits and cookies cut into various holiday-themed shapes, modern Christmas cookies, sometimes colored, can map their history to recipes from Medieval European biscuits, in which current ingredients such as cinnamon, ginger, almonds, black pepper and dried fruit were brought over to the west.Children in the United States have left cookies and milk on a table for Santa Claus on Christmas Eve, though many people simply eating the baked sweets themselves.