I don't know what possessed me to call friends over, but I have no regrets. We finally made time and squeezed in our annual gingerbread decorating party.
It's our family tradition, having friends over and we bequeath them a kit and we offer them hot glue for assembly and food for their appetites, and, in recent years, we slip "Elf" in the player. And then it's sweet creativity and sugary abandon for the rest of the evening!
Alex worked on an Ikea house, so he could, at long last, try skipping the hot glue, and go
all icing. He had great success with this, though we did have to modify the very thick icing.
I whipped-up a little hot glue and graham cracker creation just for Maria to decorate. Why hot glue? It's fast and it holds, and we never eat our houses. That's how we do it.
Our friends, Adam, Anne and Jacob, voted to go with an all icing construction too. Patiently they waited out the 15 minute drying time... alas, in the end, the icing was less than effective, so we came in with a last minute hot glue fix on the roof. It's like
retrofitting, which is something Californians are quite accustomed to.
Mitchell and William worked together as a dream team... I think they could enter a
Food Network Challenge!
Without debate or conflict, they quietly set to making a very thoughtfully decorated gingerbread masterpiece.
Maria scored points for patience and novice skill. She even endured the dreaded
sticky fingers! And then she discovered they were
sweet and
sticky fingers... hmmm, not bad!
She really loved this decorating business.
Max was disappointed that
Mom was too lazy to let him mix 4 different colored icings this year. I won't apologize: I didn't have my partner and fellow clean-up man, Geoff, this time, so I meant to keep it simple...
simpler... somewhat.
Mitchell could not believe that we never eat our houses and my boys could not comprehend wanting to eat the houses. They do
look good enough to eat, but it's just not part of our tradition.
The *L* Team: Jacob, Anne and Adam. Their house is going to smell so good and gingery!
Our house smells good and gingery too.
Maria was so happy this morning when she got to show her daddy her house.
I found another
old post about our gingerbread traditions, from 2003,, but I need to unlock all the pictures... that might not happen too soon, but I'll try. (Update: I fixed the photo links. Good grief that was hard.) Now, I am off to make tamales!
Update part 2, with a part 3 in the works:
Max wanted to see the photos of gingerbreads past, so we went searching. No digital before 2003. We covered
2004, in this link. I didn't take pictures last year...
shocking! So, that leaves 2005: We were in the Treehouse and... well, here are the photos...
Oh my goodness... such wonderful memories.
