Four And No More: A Tale of Two Gingerbread Houses

It was the best of times. It was the worst of times. And then the worst of times became the best of times.

It all started at lunch. “Let’s do something Christmas-y,” I said. Singing Christmas carols at church had gotten me in the holiday mood, and it had been a long week with a virus taking out half of our family. After several ideas got shot down, we agreed on making gingerbread houses together. [Also a good chance to redeem myself as I still hadn’t used the gingerbread house kit my mom gave me last year!] So now that we had two gingerbread house kits (thanks for both mom!), one could be for the boys and one for the girls. Perfect, right?

Of course, there was a fight over who got which house. Somehow it ended up everyone doing the much sought over house, and Lauren and I doing the year old, I mean, cool house. After many strong admonitions by me not to eat ANYTHING out of these kits, we were off to create. The frosting turned out to be a bit of a pain to get going, but before we knew it we were putting Martha Stewart to shame.

So the new kit came with a house that was already assembled. Lauren and I got that shaft and had to put our house together first. Adding insult to injury, ~~our house had fallen many times from the shelf on which it was carefully stored during the last year~~, all of the walls had somehow gotten broken. We decided to not let it stop us, and our plan was just to “glue” them back together with the frosting. Quickly enough, our walls were erected, and it was starting to look like a real house.

Then we got cocky and tried to “glue” on the pieces that had broken off. That’s when the trouble came. The frosting that hadn’t dried yet couldn’t take the weight of the new pieces. Things fell apart in a hurry. Yells for help were heard repeatedly. Our next plan was to glue the individual pieces back together, let them harden and resume construction.

Meanwhile, Alyssa and Kate (our neighbor), took over construction of the cool kids house. The boys took off to resume their training for American Ninja Warrior, but that’s another story. Kate and Aly (sorry couldn’t resist), really were putting Martha Stewart to shame. They were following directions, making it look really pretty, and employing Jack’s expert skills of what they called “filling it in”.

So after about an hour of watching this, and tired of being slum lords in a house that clearly didn’t want to stay together, we evaluated our options. Time for a new plan. Fresh in my mind was an episode of The Middle that we had watched last night. The mom on the sitcom, Frankie, decides not to get sucked into all the hype of Christmas and enjoy her holiday for a change. (I highly recommend it; you can see more here.)

“Let’s make a crazy house,” I said to Lauren. Not sure what I meant, she continued one more time to put our Humpty Dumpty house back together. Once she gave up, I proceeded to take all the pieces of our sad little house and stack them on top of each other. After thinking about it for a second, she got my vision and we both dove in together. We ~~splattered~~ carefully placed frosting and candy all over it. Our only rule was not to waste precious chocolate on it, otherwise, anything went with our gingerbread house! We laughed our heads off and had the best time gleefully making a creation that we decided looked like the Big Bad Wolf meets Frosty’s Gingerbread House. We had the had so much fun and loved every second of it!

Meanwhile, the Marthas continued on their perfect suburbia dwelling. We thought they were secretly jealous that they couldn’t do as good of a job as we did. They joined us after a while and Drew did, too, especially after the girls wouldn’t let him touch the house that was originally his! The next thing I knew, the kids were getting out their candy bags and adding to the splendor of our creation. Free Parenting Tip: This is an excellent way to use up your child’s Halloween candy without them actually consuming it.

So while today didn’t turn out to be the magical holiday moment I envisioned that would ease some Mom Guilt, it turned out to be a fun memory we’ll never forget. Here are pictures of what the box led us to believe we would create and the final product.