Let me tell you, shopping for and baking 2000 cookies on your own isn't exactly easy. Especially provided that you are in Thailand and need to find 20 packs of round rainbow sprinkles, amongst a variety of other non-Asian ingredients, all of which are packaged according to the metric system. (Mental picture: me in a Thai grocery store trying to do the conversions and then the multiplications of the 2-dozen-yield recipes in my head)

As my Christmas present for everyone on board (regardless of the overwhelming presence of Israelis), I had planned to bake 2 different kinds of cookies by the 25th (and a 3rd pain-in-the-butt-candy-cane cookie if I was feeling spunky) and if you've talked to me in the past week or so, you know that time-wise, this was close to impossible, as we have been crazy busy with preparation for our biggest event of the year. So while the Christmas party on the 24th was raging, I planted myself in the kitchen and went to work.

The coolest part about this, well there are 3 cool things, was that 1) much to my surprise, chocolate chip cookies are not as international as this little naive American had thought (most people had never had them before), 2) Oksy, our restaurant manager, hugged me for about 20 minutes because my baking reminded her of her grandmother's and 3) all of the Vietnamese cooks stayed with me for a majority of the night because they wanted to learn the recipe. As the cookies baked, we had a few kitchen-rock-out sessions with my ipod, which is something I will never forget. I will also never forget the huge fight I had with the head chef at 5 a.m. when I insisted I was going to clean all of the pans and utensils because if I didn't, "my mother would feel it in her bones all the way back in the U.S.," so for my mom's sake, he let me do it. Quite the Christmas Eve, I must say.

And yes, ladies and gentlemen, cookies make people happy. Going around the whole ship from the gangway, to the engine-room, to the bridge, to the pool-deck, to the you-name-it-I-was-there, I couldn't have had a warmer Christmas.

Of the cookie pictures, I like this one the best because of the lower-right-hand corner. Notice there are significantly less in this tray than all of the others... damage done by the cooks, wait-staff annnd yours truly one Christmas Eve in Koh Chang, Thailand.