One of my favorite parts about the Christmas season is all the yummy homemade cookies and candies that seem to be everywhere you look. While baking is great fun, an easy way to get a wide assortment of cookies without having to bake numerous recipes is to get friends together for a cookie swap.

We’ve shared some cookie swap tips with you in the past, and this year I designed a fun invitation to send out for the event. The invitation looks like a bag of cookies and it turned out so cute that I almost want to eat it!

To make your own cookie swap invites, start by downloading our customizable Microsoft Word template:

Cookie Swap Invitation Template (DOC)

The template has three pages. The first page says “Cookie Swap” and will be the front of your invitation. The third page shows the backs of cookies and will be used as the back of your invitation, which will make a really fun surprise when the invites are flipped over. These two pages require no customization and are ready to print as they are.

However, the second page — the one with all the party details — will need to be customized. Here’s where you can make the invite look professional with custom text and save yourself some aches from too much handwriting! Just click on the default text in the template, which will put you in edit mode. Then edit the text as desired (including font and color if you want) with your party information. (Tip: If you find that you can’t fit all your info/rules on one page, you can make two or three different “second pages” to hold all the info.)

Once you’ve printed the pages onto white cardstock, cut the cookie designs out with scissors.

Then grab some quart-sized food storage bags (one per invitation) and cut the zip-top off.

Now take the front of the invitation and stack it, face up, on top of the second page, which is also face up. Then stack those together on top of the third page (the back of the cookies), which is face down. Having the cookie backs showing on the back of the invitation will make it so cute from both sides!

Slip the stack of pieces into the bag. It’s almost totally cute. Can you tell how close we are?

Bunch the top of the bag up and tie it with a piece of light blue ribbon (try to match the blue on the cookies if you can).

Maximum cuteness reached! The invite is ready to tuck into a standard 5 3/4″ x 8 3/4″ envelope and put in the mail.

I mean seriously, how yummy does this look?