Christmas cookie calendar,

Welcome to our fifth annual holiday cookie calendar.

This year, for the first time, we invited Star readers to share their treasured recipes instead of testdriving cookbook and magazine recipes.

The emails and letters poured in and it was tough to choose just 24.

So how did we narrow it down? Back in October, we each chose 12 recipes from the stockpile and started baking. We chose recipes that had fun names, interesting ingredients, good stories behind them or just sounded tasty.

Then we headed into the photo studio for a day with photographer David Cooper to shoot the cookies for print and online.

Finally, we invited three of the 24 cookie creators into the Star test kitchen for an informal taste test so we could shoot a short video.

John D’Costa, Casey Miller and Ajitha Cyriac swapped cookie comments and baking tips with each other while nibbling away.

“I don’t think we’re going to eat lunch or dinner,” Miller said at the end of the tasting. “And no dessert for a week.”

The trio also critiqued our versions of their cookies. Cyriac makes her Diwali chai snickerdoodles “flatter and crispier.” D’Costa also makes his David and Sarah cookies “flatter and crispier.” Miller never thought to make her icing cookies “anything but round” and didn’t realize they would hold their shape so well as gingerbread men. But they all agreed we got the flavours right.

That’s one of the joys of baking — it’s highly personal and two people working from the same recipe will almost certainly create slightly different cookies.

The accuracy of your oven temperature, thickness and quality of your bakeware, temperature of your home (and ingredients), amount of time you spend creaming butter and sugar, and your preference for crispier or doughier cookies will all come into play.

So relax and experiment with this year’s cookie crop. Happy holidays. See all our christmas cookies at thestar.com/cookiecalendar