Every year, usually the second Sunday in December, we head to our friend T's house and get our gingerbread house building on. Yes, that probably sounded a bit on the cheesy side, but come on, we were building houses out of sugary cookie bits and candy, I think I can get away with being a bit on the fluffy and light side.
Anyway, my friend, amazing woman that she is, bakes all the gingerbread house pieces and whips up all the royal icing (AKA cement) for us all to glue together for decorating fun. I usually end up being covered in the icing, but this year they handed me an apron and I got to look cool while I decorated!
All of us who show up bring candy for house customization and personalization. I always get a kick out of how people's personalities shine through in their gingerbread house decorating.
For instance, some of the kids are fully into their teen years. The teen girls spent meticulous minutes carefully designing decorative schemes that wouldn't be out of place in Rockefeller Square, whereas most of the boys had more fun eating the candy and seeing how much royal icing they could plop on their house before randomly splattering handfuls of candy until the exterior of their house resembles a Pollock painting. It was pretty neat.
The adults, me included, always come up with intricate patterns of decor. This year I took an entire wall and shingled it with red and green gummy bears. Gum drops are always a popular choice for roofing as are Christmas Hershey kisses.
A nice edition to the chaos this year were a couple of toddlers. Both of my friend's adult children have moved home, and they both have respectable broods of toddlers and infants. Fingers were jabbed into prospective gingerbread house masterpieces and many, many Reese's Peanut Butter Cups and chocolate Santa's were stolen and ingested. One two year old got so wound on an excess of candy that he was fetching a smashed chocolate Santa like he was a well-behaved, albeit hyper, beagle. He wasn't even dissuaded when I told him his chocolate looked like a cat turd. I was amused though.
One older child wished to help me decorate and really wanted to put a red Swedish fish on my house's front door. I was feeling agreeable and acquiesced to her very polite request. After squeezing some icing onto the fish and letting her press it on the door, both I and another woman next to me busted up into giggles, the fish looked like an appendage of the phallic sort. Juvenile of me I know, but in my defense, I was hanging out with kids.
And did the kids ever have fun. The teens flirted and trash talked each other, the toddlers wreaked sugar high destruction, the adults told yarns and tried to reign in the toddlers, it was rather glorious.
The end result was also pretty nice too.
Over the next couple of weeks, much of the candy will disappear off of my house, the baby gorilla that is in residence here has a sweet tooth, but instead of being sad, the waning of the candy on my house is a sign of the fun to come.
For you see, we have another tradition regarding gingerbread houses in our household. We build them the second week of December and then on New Year's Day we blow them up with shotguns. Pulverized sugar really does look pretty exploding into the air and coloring the snow on one's gun range after all.
