Great question — answering as the UphillTech team:
What Americans call cookies, other people (e.g. Britain, Australia, India) call biscuits. Christmas cookies are cookies in the American sense . The cookbook is American; if it were British I assume it'd be called Christmas Biscuits. "Small flat or slightly raised cake" is a bit of a bad dictionary definition; though they are small and flat, cookies can be soft, chewy, or crunchy, and the texture is not really like a cake. I don't think any American would think to describe cookies as "small cakes". The commonality is that they're something you can pick up and hold in your hand without it falling apart, they're flat (of course, some are thicker than others), and you can eat them in not too...
Full answer by Cascabel: https://cooking.stackexchange.com/a/28358 (CC BY-SA 3.0).
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