My mother usually makes three kinds of Christmas cookies: gingerbread cut-outs, white-velvet cutouts (sugar cookies with cream cheese in the batter), and press cookies. The press cookies are my favorite. We originally had a Mirro cookie press, which functioned like a cross between a coffee press and an icing bag with a tip. Dough was put into a metal tube and pushed out with a plunger through a disk with a shape so the cookie would have a shape without having to be cut out.*
Mirro cookie press. Image from food.com.
