12 Christmas Cookie Decorating Ideas for Festive Holiday Baking

A plate of plain cut-out cookies is a blank canvas, but it can be hard to know where to start. Royal icing or buttercream? Bold red and green or soft pink? One showpiece cookie or a tray the kids can help with?

These Christmas cookie decorating ideas come from bakers who shared their own cookies and tutorials. They range from easy designs you can pipe with one star tip to detailed sets with lettering and paint, so you can pick a look that matches your time, your tools and the people decorating with you.

Before you start decorating

Choose your icing

Royal icing dries firm and smooth, which is why it is used for flooding, fine lines and cookies that need to be stacked or packed. Buttercream stays soft and is easier for beginners and kids, and star tips give it instant texture. Many of the ideas below say which one the baker used.

Keep the palette tight

Two or three colors plus white usually look more polished than every color in the box. Classic red and green, red and cream, or pink and red all work well on a single tray.

Use safe ingredients

If your royal icing recipe calls for raw egg whites, the FDA recommends using pasteurized eggs or pasteurized egg products for foods that are eaten raw; meringue powder is another common option. For shimmer, the FDA advises using glitters and dusts made to be edible, with an ingredient list, and not products labeled only “non-toxic” or “for decorative purposes only.”

Give it time to set

Royal icing details need time to dry between layers and before cookies are stacked or wrapped, so plan detailed sets a day or two ahead of a party or cookie exchange.

1. Marbled Ornament Cookies

Round ornament cookies are covered in bright marbling in pink, blue, green, red and white, then finished with gold caps. In Haniela’s step photos, stripes of colored icing are piped onto the wet base and pulled with a thin tool, which creates the feathered pattern.

Difficulty: The marbling looks detailed, but it is one of the more forgiving royal icing techniques because no two cookies need to match.

Display tip: Lay them out in rows on a red tray or tie them in clear bags so the colors show through.

2. Buttercream Leaf Wreaths

These ring-shaped sugar cookies are piped all the way around with green buttercream and finished with a small red bow. Susan Brings Dessert uses a round cutter for the wreath shape and pipes the frosting with open star tips, mixing two shades of green for depth.

What you need: A round cutter with a smaller cutter for the center, green and red frosting, and a star tip.

Best for: Family decorating, because a wreath can be built up one squeeze at a time and small mistakes disappear into the texture.

3. Rosette Wreaths With Sprinkled Edges

White-glazed wreath cookies get a ring of red rosettes, little green leaves and a sparkly rim of gold and white sprinkles. Style Sweet dips the cookies in a thin glaze instead of outlining and flooding, rolls the edges in sprinkles, then pipes the rosettes with a star tip and the leaves with a leaf tip.

Time: Dipping saves a lot of time compared with outlining and flooding each cookie.

Make it yours: Swap the red rosettes for white or pale pink if you want a softer, more elegant tray.

4. Textured Buttercream Trees

Tree cookies are piped in ruffled white and deep green buttercream, some with tiny sprinkles like ornaments, and set on a green transferware platter. Curly Girl Kitchen’s tutorial uses only buttercream and a few piping tips, including small and medium star tips and a leaf tip.

Difficulty: A good first project for anyone nervous about royal icing, since each tree is just layers of piped texture.

Display tip: Mixing all-white trees with green ones makes a simple tray look like a snowy forest.

5. Pink and Red Bows, Stockings and Gifts

This cheerful flat lay mixes pink and red bows, red stockings, little wrapped gifts, wreaths and Santa faces, with white details tying it all together. Sticking to pink, red, green and white keeps a busy set of shapes looking like one collection.

Palette: Pink and red is a fresh change from classic red and green and still reads as Christmas.

Display tip: Scatter the cookies across a white board or parchment for a flat lay that looks good on a dessert table.

6. Tired Santa Suit Cookies

Instead of decorating Santa himself, these cookies show his red suit, mittens and boots with fluffy white trim, next to a plaque cookie that reads “It’s been a long week.” The Bearfoot Baker made the set as a funny nod to how Santa might feel after delivering all those toys.

Make it yours: Change the message on the plaque to a family joke or a name for a personalized cookie box.

Difficulty: The suit and boots are simple shapes, so the fur trim and lettering are where most of the detail goes.

7. Piped Snowflakes in Aqua and White

An aqua snowflake cookie is covered in fine white lines, dots and loops, shown here with a matching sweater and mitten. The Flour Box made the snowflakes as part of a winter set and notes that dots, loops, lines and teardrops can be piped to create a variety of snowflake designs.

Make it yours: No two snowflakes need to match, so a batch is a good way to practice fine lines.

Best season: Aqua and white snowflakes work for Christmas and still make sense on a January cookie tray.

8. Reindeer in Knit Hats

Brown reindeer faces with shiny red noses and tan antlers wear chunky knit hats in red, green and white, surrounded by other winter character cookies. In her tutorial, Lila Loa builds the hat in layers of icing and draws the face details with a food color marker.

What you need: Brown, tan, red, green and white icing, plus an edible marker for the eyes and smile.

Best for: Kids’ parties and classroom treat bags, where a funny face goes a long way.

9. Hand-Lettered Merry Christmas Plaques

Deep red and cream cookies include a scalloped plaque lettered with “Merry Christmas,” big bows outlined with white piping and trees with tiny piped details. SweetAmbs used wet-on-wet royal icing and natural food coloring for this set, and her post explains how she writes on cookies without a projector.

Palette: A muted red with cream and sage looks a little more vintage than bright primary colors.

Make it yours: Swap the greeting for a family name or the year to make the plaque a keepsake for a gift box.

10. Painted Christmas Lightbulbs

Bulb-shaped cookies iced in white are painted with bright red, yellow, green and blue and strung together with baker’s twine for a playful Christmas light garland. Silvertooth Home paints on top of frosted sugar cookies with edible paint, so the white base acts like a canvas.

Display tip: Lay a length of twine across a platter and arrange the bulbs along it so they look like a strand of lights.

Difficulty: Painting is a nice option if piping is not your strength, since you can build color slowly with a brush.

11. Classic Gingerbread Men

Spiced gingerbread men are finished with simple white piped lines, little faces and red candy buttons. Averie Cooks decorates them with an icing made from confectioners’ sugar, corn syrup, vanilla and milk, plus cinnamon candies for the nostalgic look.

Best for: Decorating with kids; the outline is quick and everyone can add their own buttons and faces.

Make it yours: Add a tiny piped scarf or bow tie in red or green to give each cookie its own personality.

12. Stained Glass Star Cookies

Star cookies have smaller star windows filled with melted candy in red, green, blue and purple, so they glow when the light hits them. Noshtastic uses two star cutters and crushed hard candies in the cut-out centers, and her version uses a gluten-free dough.

What you need: Two cutters of the same shape in different sizes, and clear hard candies sorted by color.

Make it yours: Noshtastic found that too much candy can bubble over the cookie, so a small amount in each window keeps the edges neat.

Pick one or two of these ideas, keep the colors simple and give yourself enough drying time, and your Christmas cookie tray will look as good as it tastes. For more holiday treats, try these gingerbread house decorating ideas, set up a hot cocoa bar to serve with your cookies, or add them to a dessert charcuterie board.

Featured image credit: Curly Girl Kitchen.