49/52: Gingerbread Houses!

 

Normally we do one big gingerbread house all together from a Costco kit every year, but they didn't have them this year! Or we missed them or something... So I ended up having to get a couple kits with mini-houses, and they were a HUGE hit, despite the pain it is assembling them before the kids can actually decorate them (do it the night before so you don't have people touching them and messing them up while they dry!). The only problem is that there ended up not being enough icing for the extra houses, so now we have three bare houses that I *was* going to decorate as a cathartic adult activity. Don't tell the kids, but I'm gonna give them to the chickens, I do NOT like gingerbread and I'm tired of them taking up space!

The plan was to get these decorated on the feast of Our Lady of Loreto, since that's a house-themed feast day... But I didn't have my act together, so we did them on the feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe instead. Nobody complained, probably because I never actually told them which day we'd be putting the houses together! This is the convenient thing about moveable traditions... During the twelve days of Christmas, I'll designate one day (probably a day when I'm too tired to plan anything else) as "Gingerbread Day," which means they get to take their gingerbread house outside, eat as much of it as they can handle, and then throw the rest to the chickens. It's great because they don't touch the houses until that day, so you don't have nasty half-eaten houses languishing on every surface, and the process of picking them apart keeps them outdoors for a while, where they can run off the sugar!

It's interesting to see how everything progresses from methodical and neat to absolute chaos as they get tired of piping the frosting on and want to just use up the rest of their carefully-divided candy! Some of these definitely had promise. All of them ended up looking like insane sugar bombs. But they had fun, and now we've done the Very Important Tradition that they look forward to every year (and that I could do without, I'll be honest). Tradition!!!