The Gingerbread House

Aren't holiday memories made from rolling out dough and hearing Mommy mutter, "Dammit, I think I burned the roof," and smelling the hot gingerbread as it cools and hearing Mommy say, "No! I said don't touch it! The walls will collapse! Let the mortar-icing dry and then you can touch it! No! Don't touch the gable end! GO PLAY WITH YOUR BROTHER!" and seeing the finished house, a blank slate ready to decorate--of which I failed to take any photos, it seems?

I made our gingerbread house from scratch again this year, partly because I think store-bought stuff like this cheapens the holiday fun and also because it is really pretty easy. I'd already made plenty of gingerbread dough. I just had to cut out some house parts from a manila folder, put them together to make sure the parts all fit, roll the dough out into sheets, trace and cut the house parts, and bake. Of course I forgot to cut out doors and windows and I forgot to make a chimney, but whatever. There's always next year!

Also, while the overhang on the side walls was fine, I forgot to create a soffit on the gable ends (I know, right? Can you even believe it?). No matter.

Last year decorating our house was a full family event (minus Ben, who was probably sleeping), with C busy making train tracks out of Twizzlers and pretzels. We build a little wood shed last year, too, next to the house. We had a landscaped pathway. Max and C and I stayed up working on it one evening, and it was really something to see when we were done with it.

This year, the holiday flurry overcame us somehow. I did do a lot of baking with the kids (post and photos to follow, as I'm pretty sure we should win an award for sheer breakage--of dishes). As for the gingerbread house, there was never a good evening for all of us to work on it, and somehow the weekend before Christmas was a cookie-decorating weekend instead, or something.

So Max and Ben worked on the house one evening.


Ben, of course, wanted to eat all the gumdrops and pretzels. He kept puling them off the roof as fast as Max could put them on.


I tried to pretend that the raw egg whites in the royal icing couldn't possibly contain salmonella. All the sugar would have killed it, right?


I helped a little bit. Ben kind of sort of helped. But mostly, this was Max's project. I assisted him with making doors and windows. The rest was all him, though.


I especially love the pretzel placement on the roof.

We never did decorate one wall, but no matter. It is a beautiful house.

On Christmas morning, Max kept asking why Santa had not eaten it. I explained that Santa ate the cookies we'd left him, but Max was still confused. Now he wants to know when we can eat it. I wonder if he remembers that last year I ate most of the gingerbread house during a January blizzard when I felt like we were low on supplies. (We survived the storm, by golly, but our little gingerbread house did not.)