When the children were young and I was overwhelmed with cleaning, cooking, shopping, wrapping, decorating, parties;  the one party I loved attending was the Cookie Exchanges.  Usually these were organized by someone at one of the kids schools.  Not only did it give me an evening away from kids, husband and chaos, but the cookies were so good!

We would each bring a variety of cookies to the exchange.  For instance each person who attends makes a large batch of cookies (2 recipes each), then divide those batches into a dozen cookies each, then everyone who attends will go home with enough cookies for the holidays!  To make it even better, we each brought the recipes with us and copied them so each of us had the recipes from the other people.