1. Heat oven to 400 degrees. Mix margarine and sugar. Mix in remaining ingredients.
2. Place dough in cookie press; form desired shapes on ungreased cookie sheet. Bake until set but not brown, 6-9 minutes. Immediately remove from cookie sheet.
3. Decorate with colored sugars, nonpareils, red cinnamon candies, or finely chopped nuts.
Spritz cookies are traditional Christmas cookies in Scandinavian countries. The name comes from the German word spritzen, meaning "to squirt" because the soft dough is squirted or pushed through a cookie press to make fancy designs. By the 1500s, Christmas cookies had caught on all over Europe. German families baked up pans of Lebkuchen and buttery Spritz cookies. Papparkakor (spicy ginger and black-pepper delights) were favorites in Sweden; the Norwegians made krumkake (thin lemon and cardamom-scented wafers). A Norwegian tradition is to make them in shapes of S's and O's. The earliest Christmas cookies in America came ashore with the Dutch in the early 1600s.