Color-a-Cookie Cookie Coloring Kit

Christmas cookies represent the season's most delicious triumph. Most Christians and secular Christmas-observing types regard the baked wonders as a key harbinger of the holiday. They don't hang around for months on end, like retail Christmas displays, and they don't require you to wait three-and-a-half weeks until Christmas, like an advent calendar. By the time cookie day rolls around, you've decorated the tree, hung the stockings by the chimney with care and dreamed and dreamed of a white Christmas. If you're a kid, the cookies are the reward for all that hard work you put in wrapping presents and, well, being patient.

Christmas is so close you can literally taste it.

Huddled in the warmth of your kitchen, you can eat raw dough, lick frosting off of spoons, fill your mouth with nothing but sprinkles or just bake, frost, decorate and eat, the way the FDA would have you do it.

Bake. Frost. Decorate. Eat. They're the four horsemen of Christmas cookiedom.

But what if you're lazy? Say you just want to eat? There are plenty of people who can help you with that.

If, for some perplexing reason, you want only to decorate and eat, your best bet — well, only bet — is the Color-a-Cookie Cookie Coloring Kit, wherein your cookie is baked and frosted by someone else before it is printed with some kind of presumably edible ink. The whole thing is then shrink-wrapped, paired with a couple of colored "flavor markers" and vacuum packed against a piece of cardboard, action-figure style.

It's hard to guess the target audience for the cookies, basically a page of a coloring book in cookie form. One would imagine Color-a-Cookie has done OK with its licensed, non-Santa cookies such as SpongeBob Squarepants and Sesame Street. All the cookies, however, look suspiciously like dry-wall and through the packaging feel like they could stop a bullet.

Yet Color-a-Cookie is clearly intended as a food item, despite the "best before" date being blacked out on the cookie I bought recently at Cost Plus. The packaging warns that a patent is pending, but it comes with nutritional information, which would lead one to believe that the FDA is willing at least to vouch for the stuff.

In other words, it won't kill you. Probably.

Once the cookie and markers are liberated from their surprisingly sturdy packaging, the product starts to seem more edible. It's no tougher bite than those ultra-decorated shrink-wrapped sugar cookies they sell at Starbucks. The Color-a-Cookie has to hold together during shipping, but you're unlikely to chip a tooth. The overall consistency (and flavor in general) is more akin to stale shortbread than plaster of Paris. Certainly, if your fiancee's nephew gave these out as party favors, you could fake enjoying the thing without grimacing obviously.

That's hardly an endorsement, which means that the "Color" part of Color-a-Cookie is what's meant to pay the bills.

Well, coloring is a snap; the markers write right on the cookies and have a fine enough point that it's easy to stay within the lines — or, for the more artistic, give Santa some bitchin' tats.

That said, it's a cookie, not the Sistine Chapel ceiling, which means the whole enterprise, however fun you may find it, is over in about a minute. You now face the daunting task of eating stale shortbread that you just wrote on with markers.

The product's most promising aspect is that when you're done coloring your cookie, you can move onto other food items. Sandwiches, potatoes and breadsticks might be a good bet, but the marker is optimized for coloring on the dry, flat surface of the cookie. My efforts to give myself a black tongue came up short, and despite repeated attempts, a red carrot was out of the question. Crackers proved receptive enough to the ink, but the uneven surface made it difficult to read. Hell, the markers didn't even show up on paper as well as they did on Jolly Old St. Nick. It wouldn't even make a compelling photo essay.

It's hard, then, to discern the method to Color-a-Cookie's madness. Who's buying this thing? Parents who want their kids to grow up eating markers and writing on their food? Parents who want their kids to walk by a section of dry-wall and think, "Mmmm. Tasty?" Parents too busy/lazy to make real cookies but who want their kids to share in at least the final stages of a sacred holiday rite?

Does the whole product line mean that Osama Bin Laden has gotten into America's food supply, and is trying to turn an entire generation of American children into marker-sniffing fiends?

With a website that introduces "what's new for 2003," it may all be a moot point.

— Eric Wittmershaus (ericw at flakmag dot com)