Have you ever made a gingerbread house?  A real one.  From scratch.  Not from a box, where the actual gingerbread is already formed, baked, and ready to go, so all you have to do is the really fun stuff, the decorating.

Yeah.  Me neither.  Until this year.  And now, that it’s all said and done, and shimmering in the center of our kitchen table, it’s been deemed another one of our ‘official’ traditions around here.  Every year.  Gingerbread.  House.  From scratch.

It started as a pretty simple idea.  Who knew that what began as a breezy trip to the grocery store, with one of our daughters calling out - ‘hey, bring back a gingerbread kit, okay’  could possibly turn into a three day odyssey, filled with laughter, swear words, near tears,  thrown off aprons, a disastrous kitchen, and so on.

But alas.  We now have our magical, frosted, candy laden house as our very own Christmas centerpiece.  Our youngest daughter, age 8, even wrote an ‘article’ about it, for the magazine the girls created after the gingerbread house adventure.  Oddly, after she read her piece, she called herself a blogger, and pointed at me, and said, ‘well, now that I’m a blogger, I’ll have to be prepared for all kinds of comments!’  Funny!

Back to the gingerbread house.  We couldn’t find a prefab kit at the store.  Perhaps they’d sold out.  No big deal I thought.  We’d make it from scratch.  How hard could it be?  Seriously!  Mix, roll, cut, bake, decorate.  Hooray!

Yeah well, as if.  Parts of the process went smoothly.  Most didn’t.  The hardest part was not the mixing, the rolling, or the cutting.  It was the getting the house to behave like a house.  Just to stand up straight, like a house please, so we could move on to the fun stuff.  The candy, the color, the sugar, and the icing. 

Not so fast.  Not so fast at all.  Even my husband couldn’t figure out how to make the ‘damn thing’ stand!  We tried rigging it all kinds of ways.  Finally, our twelve year old yanked off her Christmas apron and said, ‘oh forget it!’  Well then.  Forget it no way.  No way would I be beaten by something as simple and traditional as a basic gingerbread house.  How hard could two baked sides, holding up two baked roof pieces be? 

Harder than we could have imagined, as it turns out.  What was to be a simple house, ended up being more of a tent, or maybe an A - frame, propped up in the center by a tall ceramic coffee mug.  But hey, it was standing.  Our beloved house, made from scratch.  My daughter put her apron back on.  The girls started singing Rudolph.  The fun began in earnest. Oh, the singing and the dancing. Our gingerbread lean to was magical after all, holding it’s own under the weight of the colorful icing, the ribbon candy chimney, the colored sugar snow. 

We’ve already begun designing our house for next year.  We’re talking serious architectural features here - porch, steps, sidewalks, etc….. We’ll see.  In the meantime, another tradition has made the books.

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