The gingerbread house!

As you may recall last Christmas we made a conscious decision to simplify the holiday season.  We did not get a Christmas tree, we did not overly decorate the house, we did not buy a lot of "stuff" and we did not send out Christmas cards.

This Christmas, we're doing much of the same (although we did buy a tree from a local tree farm).  We made most of our gifts (as did my older brother and his wife apparently--can't wait to try the peach sauces!) and I did not send out cards again (I don't think there is a good picture of the three of us anyway from this past year). 

Bud is now sitting on my lap dictating the following sentences...
 
We did however, attempt our first gingerbread house.  The result below is all edible as gingerbread houses should be.  The recipe (and templates) for the house came right out of Joy of Cooking.   Bud and his dad tastefully decorated the house and the yard, complete with a version of the Phillies baseball park called Citizen's Bank Park.  The outfield was made of strips of apple flavored licorice.  The other side of the lawn contains a garden (made from nerds) and a dog made from left over gingerbread and Good n' Plentys with a gumdrop head.  Notice the bowls of leftover candy in the back of the picture.  We have continued to consume this sugar throughout the weekend giving us all sugar highs and subsequent sugar lows (and snarly attitudes).  Tonight, at least, my darling husband will be making homemade chili, which should revive us in time for the last work and school week before the holiday.  

      

Growing up, my father (B's Grandpa Karl) often got carried away with the annual gingerbread house.  By the end of the gingerbread era in our household, we had a totally furnished and well-lit two-story gingerbread house complete with dormer, stained glass windows, and a working chimney.  The yard included picket fences, forests (made from upside down ice cream cones), driveways, automobiles, children building snowmen, and pets wandering around.  I believe we even had smaller graham cracker houses encircling the main house for other folks to live in.

It was always a sad day on January 1st, when the three of us kids would unceremoniously smash the house (or village, as may be the case).  Then, to the horror of my parents, we would greedily eat the stale and not so tasty pieces of gingerbread, frosting and candy.  I am surprised that none of us came down with salmonella poisoning (you have to watch out for that Royal Icing) or some other bacterial infection!  

(and now  Bud starts writing the post from my perspective, showing off his fabulous typing and spelling skills)

My son thought the gingerbread house turned out to be incredible. Even though his first thought for the ginger bread house was to make it the White house. He got a little carried away (like my father always did). My son got inspired for the white house when we went to the Eastman house to see the gingerbread collection. After we went to the Eastman house my son was just amazed by all the neat things we saw.

In addition to the gingerbread house we are making all sorts of cookies. In fact when I finish my blog post (which my son is proofreading) we are going to decorate the cookies with green, blue, white, red, yellow, and a few other colors of icing. Right now we are going to decorate the cookies! 

Well, we just finished making cookies. I will tell you how it went! Well first my son and I went out to the kitchen where my husband was making Chili. We had peppers near us and my husband decided to eat one. He was coughing and his throat was burning and he had to eat bread and get water and he was doing that for 5-10 minutes. Meanwhile my son was laughing his head off and couldn't breath he was laughing so hard because my husband's mouth was burning. My son said "Dad you are quite weird" and that set me on the track of laughing. My son laughed for about 10 minutes and he was rolling on the floor and all that. Well after that it turned out pretty good. Me and my son made all the cookies and decorated them and my darling husband was OK.  That was most of what happened when we were making cookies.