One Christmas tradition my kids eagerly await each year is the day my husband and I sit down at the kitchen table with them to build gingerbread houses. They each, of course, have to build their very own. So we set aside a weekend afternoon to put our baked good architectural skills to work. These whimsical little houses are utterly cheerful and remind me of a winter CandyLand. What’s not to love about creating a gumdrop path or licorice windows? Plus, this activity allows the kids’ imaginations to run wild. One year, they put a blue rolled fruit snack to use to create a “pond” outside their gingerbread homes.
In many things, I feel taking the easy way out is cheating. However, I’ve agreed to purchase gingerbread house kits in lieu of actually baking the gingerbread myself and then cutting it into cottage-friendly pieces. Perhaps if one of my engineer brothers were to assist with this endeavor, it might be worth the hassle, but I’m perfectly happy to leave the mathematics and measurements of gingerbread walls up to the experts.
The tricky part of this project is that it demands a small amount of patience. Rome wasn’t built in a day, and as we found out last year, neither are gingerbread houses. My kids are always ecstatic when I mix up the icing and their dad lays out the gingerbread pieces, but once we start erecting these little houses, my kids believe the icing should dry immediately, locking the walls, roofs and chimneys firmly in place. It can take a few hours for the icing to harden, and to decorate the houses before the walls are held fast would be to sentence the poor gingerbread house to a condemned state. (Some years, an overnight wait is necessary when roof pieces slip or walls teeter. But well worth the wait, I assure you!
So, with the iced walls of the houses held firmly in place by soup cans, we set them aside and wait. And wait. And drink some hot chocolate. And wait some more.
Long about the time the kids have given up all hope of placing peppermint swirls on roof peaks and positioning Dum-Dum sucker trees around the house, I announce the houses are ready for decorating. Let the madness begin! My daughter hits Play on the Christmas classics CD and Bing Crosby starts crooning about a white Christmas. Family holiday fun time doesn’t get much better than this.
My husband, although an enthusiastic participant, is not what you would call artistic or crafty. However, he can follow a diagram with the best of them. So, with the kit box planted in front of him, he instructs our son on the placement of hard candies as he spreads white icing over the “snow-covered” roof. I take charge of squeezing the icing out of the pastry bag to create snow peaks and drifts, doors and windows.
My daughter – the rule follower – carefully picks out a green, a red and a purple gumdrop (the order shown on the box) to adorn the window. My son, on the other hand, announces that he’d rather use Sixlets left over from Halloween to line the roof. This causes a slight fracas, followed by a discussion about creativity and the box design being merely a suggestion. With the green light to deviate from the plan, the kids search the baking cupboard for jimmies, sprinkles, coconut and anything else that lends itself well to gingerbread house decorating.
After finishing our little candy homes, the kids are thrilled. They feel not only a sense of accomplishment, but that they are productive participants in our yearly Christmas decorating. We set the gingerbread houses atop a snow white blanket of fake snow and savor the faint smell of gingerbread emanating from the china hutch.
And that’s a day’s worth of fun for less than $10.
