Moonie has a lot of trouble choosing a favorite anything. But he’ll admit one thing: his favorite food group is cookies.

So it was a treat to arrive at Hope Artiste Village this afternoon for Rhode Island Food Fights’ annual Spectacular Cookie Smackdown. Ten different bakeries were scattered throughout the village’s long hallways offering multiple flavors of delicious cookies, while Yacht Club Soda provided cold soda samples and New Harvest Coffee Roasters offered nice hot coffee.

We arrived early, at Moonie’s insistence, and he hopped back and forth from foot to foot, periodically asking, “Is it cookie time yet?”

Suddenly we heard a merry jingling of bells, and Moonie’s amber eyes bugged out. “It’s Santa, it’s Santa, it’s Santa!” He shrieked. It was the second time we’d seen Santa this weekend. What were the odds? MAGIC, that’s what.

Inside, it took only moments for us to be handed a cup of yummy root beer and then a delicious little coconut macaroon. Moonie was off to a very happy start!

He’s been “training” for this for days, sampling all of his favorite cookies in between rigorous workouts. After a few bites of a yummy lemon sandwich cookie, Moonie paused for some very important cookie pushups to stay fit enough to get more cookies.

Julians always has such interesting flavors at Rhode Island Food Fights events. This year’s entry was an herbed sesame caramel cookie. Moonie had to consider the best way to approach this combination of sweet and savory, but it didn’t take him long to polish off the goods.

This cute little soft gingerbread cookie came with a squirt of whipped cream. Yum!

Moonie ran into his friend Jim Nellis, who puts on all these fun food events. With Jim helping to hold him back, Moonie paused for a split-second photo. As soon as Jim let go, Moonie was off and running toward his cookies again. Nothing personal, Jim! There’s no getting between Moonie and cookies.

So yummy!

He could eat these all day. (And night. And day again.)

Moonie also ran into his friend John Taraborelli, who emcees the annual Cookie Spectacular and oodles of other events. While Moonie and Johnny Tabs were talking cookie shop, silly Jim decided to photobomb the picture.

Then Moonie was back in the crowd, hunting for more cookies.

He seemed quite happy with this sweet and simple vanilla sugar cookie. It’s always a victory to get him to pause for a quick photo before he demolishes his treats.

Moonie zipped up and down the hallways, enjoying his own personal heaven, but one thing brought him skidding to a halt on his bare little toes: SANTA.

“Wait, wait, I need to talk to Santa!” he shouted urgently.

It turned out that when he had seen Santa Claus at #CelebrateDowncity in Grant’s Block yesterday, he had listed all his favorite flavors of cookies as his wish list (it had taken a while).

But now he’d learned some new cookie flavors today, and he wanted to add those cookies to his list so they wouldn’t feel left out.

Santa was a good sport about the cookie additions.

Thanks to Blaze Village Kitchen, Julians, Bake Eat Love, Bake It Better, G Cafe, Hola Baked Goods, Edible Creations by Gerry, Sweet Love Bread, Lynne’s Dolce e Pane, and Bellicci’s Best for all the cookies Moonie managed to fit in his boundless little tummy, and to New Harvest and Yacht Club for the drinks to wash them down!