From 1996 to 2022

Here's another belated post from Christmas, but I have to do it.  

When we decided to host a foster child from Colombia for the month of December, I realized I needed to come up with some good activities for us to do during the day.  I didn't know much about Yara, except that she liked doing arts and crafts.

Rewind 26 years.  In December of 1996, I was reading the newspaper one day (wow, that sounds so old-fashioned) and I saw a food column by Martha Stewart that included recipes one could use to build a gingerbread house.  My twenty-year-old self thought it seemed like a great idea, so I made a plan with my then-boyfriend (now husband) to build a gingerbread house.  

I had never seen a kit in a store; I didn't know they existed.  I jumped in with no idea what I was doing, I mean, how hard could it be?  So we baked sheets of gingerbread and then measured and cut them into walls and a roof for a house.  It was time consuming, but it was fun!  It was the first and only gingerbread house I have ever made.  Until now.

Fast forward to this December.  I had always wanted to make another gingerbread house, but after making the first one I realized what a big project it would be.  And if the first house was just a small, square house, the second should be grander, right?  I'd think about it every year at Christmas, but it was never the right time.  

So I asked my son and Yara if they would like to build a house (they had no idea what they were signing up for), and they agreed.

So our team of three created a house.  Tavo watched a video of a gingerbread house build on Youtube, and decided to use the style of the house in the video.  So he got a cardboard box and a ruler and created a pattern for the same style house, then he and Yara built a model.  It was much bigger and more elaborate than my original house.

We spent a couple of days baking all the gingerbread and cutting the parts; the third day we assembled the house, gluing it together with the icing.  It was indeed a long project.

Would you like to see the result?

First, here are some pics of my original house from 1996 (taken with a crappy point-and-shoot camera):

This was back in the days of no internet, so the whole project was done using just our own ideas; I think it's more fun that way.

It was a simple house, but I like our chimney and the brick foundation made with red candies.

We also had a little fishpond and a garden (with little candy pumpkins and watermelon slices 😊).

I also impressed myself with our Hershey bar roof.

It was a great little house if I do say so myself.

But back to 2022.  Here are some construction photos of our house:

Here are Tavo and Yara making the design and building the cardboard model of the house:

Next we made batches and batches of gingerbread to have enough to make all the house pieces.

Years ago I found this cookie cutter kit on a discount sale after Christmas at Williams Sonoma.

It makes 3D trees, snowmen, a sleigh and reindeer.

Knowing I always wanted to do another gingerbread house, I thought it would be perfect to use.  (Or else to decorate cakes with at Christmas.)  All these years it had been waiting in the back of the pantry for the right time for it's debut.

And here is the completed house!

We had to put the project on hold because of commitments to other things; we spent Yara's last day here decorating it.  We covered the whole house in frosting and used Life cereal for the roof.

But I didn't want to leave it incomplete...

Here is the final, final house.

Tavo and I spent the afternoon of New Year's Day completing the outside parts.  

Yara painted the gingerbread people before she left.

Just like before (except for patterning the house from one in a Youtube video), we didn't use the internet for ideas, we just used whatever we could think of ourselves.

I love it!

We recycled the fish pond idea from the last house, and used all the 3D cookie cutters.

Years ago for Christmas I made "stained glass cookies" - these beautiful cookies that looked like stained glass windows.  To make the "windows" in the cookies, you cut the center part out, then pulverized hard candies of different colors to dust.  The hard candy dust was placed in cut out part of the cookie, as it cooked in the oven the candy melted into "glass."

I thought the same thing might work for our windows, so we ground up butterscotch candies and baked them in the window spaces of the gingerbread.

They came out perfectly!

The house has twelve windows; they were even solid and strong.

The house is sitting on a piece of wood we covered with aluminum foil, and then frosting.

The hardest parts?  Well, the rooves (which were large and heavy) each broke in half when we were trying to put them on.  We were all afraid they would collapse inward and the whole project would be over.  We had to glue them back together with frosting and hold them in place.  Fortunately, when the icing dries it's better than liquid cement.

We also had pieces of the 3D tree and reindeer break; the sleigh was hardest of all, as it broke in three different pieces during painting and assembly.  We covered the breaks as best we could.

I realized afterward the house was missing a chimney.

Our house was definitely a labor of love!  It was also the perfect project to occupy three "artists" for about a week's worth of time.

I'm really glad it's done.  But now I keep thinking about how to design the NEXT house...(How about one with a Santa up on the chimney?)  If my timeline stays consistent, I'll be 72 when I make that one. 

Wow. 🤯  On that note, I guess I'll wrap this up.  I'm feeling a little bit lost for words at the moment.