Gingerbread House Day

Making gingerbread houses has been an activity Carter and I have loved doing together for as long as she can remember. We don’t really make the gingerbread house, we just assemble and decorate them.

I waited this year to do my Trader Joe’s house for when Carter got home. She is having a gingerbread house team Zoom event tomorrow and each of her co-workers were sent a house kit from Micheal’s. As Carter is the facilitator of the event she ordered all the houses to be sent to homes of her work team. Then she sent instructions about putting the house together a day in advance of decorating.

Since decorating in front of a camera is difficult her team decided that it will be a contest to see who made the best house so they each had to finish their house before the zoom tomorrow. Not that I am competitive, but I was very excited that Carter could win this contest given her twenty year history of house decorating.

Carter set me straight that as the facilitator she was not allowed to win. This was greatly disappointing to me, but it did not stop us from going to town decorating our houses.

As we squeezed out icing from piping bags and carefully placed tiny candies on our houses we discussed our best house decorating experience. We quickly agreed it was when Carter was six or seven years old. Our club had a house decorating event and they made giant mansion like houses. It took a very long time to fully decorate our house. As I remember it the kids gave up half way through and just turned to eating the decorative candies. I, of course was not about to take home a half finished house, so I guarded my candies and continued working.

The next year the club had learned it’s lessons and did not make such large homemade houses. We all were very disappointed to discover the ranch sized house down grades. It was the beginning of the end of the club as far as I was concerned.

Maybe one day I will try and bake my own house, for now we will be satisfied with kits.