Gingerbread

Yesterday we tried to decorate a gingerbread house together as a family.

It was …an adventure.

The first mistake was made when I bought the kit. I could choose between an assembled house, all ready to go, with icing on the roof and everything, or for one dollar less, a kit that had all the pieces ready for us to assemble. I stood there in the store for a while, trying to figure out which one I should get. Finally, I bought the un-assembled house, because it seemed too easy to get one that only needed to be decorated. I mean, that would take, like, half the fun out of it.

I was very wrong. It would have made everything else twice as much fun if that dumb house had been assembled already.

The second mistake was making it a family activity. Anika and I have always made these houses together every Christmas, and it’s been fun. Adding a husband who is unhappy that I didn’t get the assembled house, and a very active one-year-old to the mix does not multiply the fun, it multiplies the chaos. Ben was (mostly) a good sport about it, but his passion definitely does not lie in decorating gingerbread.

We spent the entire time trying to keep Kaylia away from the candy, and trying to hide the fact that it was a gingerbread COOKIE house. If she would have found out it was a cookie, she would have been gnawing on a roof piece the whole time.

The third mistake is still a mystery to me. Every other house that I’ve made with Anika has stayed together, but this one did not. We kept jamming the roof back into place, but it would not stay there. After the girls went to bed, Ben and I watched a movie, and the entire time we were sitting on the couch, we kept hearing candies plopping off the roof.

It’s kind of in a sorry state now, but here’s a picture of it in one of it’s better moments:

It doesn’t look like that anymore.

Things I have learned for next time:

1) Always buy pre-assembled.

2) It’s a girls’ thing – do it while Ben is having fun doing something else.

3) Kaylia is not old enough to fully appreciate this tradition. We’ll see where she’s at next year…

A Fourth Lesson Learned the Next Day:

4) Do not take any of Ben’s comments seriously, because the next day he talked about how much “fun” we had, working on the gingerbread house together as a family.

Were we working on the same gingerbread house??

No, it was fun…for the first little while. We had fun for the length of time it would have taken us to decorate the assembled house!