#52 Ancestors 2022 Week 50 Traditions: Gingerbread Houses

 One of the first things I bought when I found out I was going to be a grandmother was a plastic form for building "gingerbread" houses.  I had visions of decorating this model with my grandchildren and I knew I would never make it with real gingerbread.  For me, plastic was the way to go and it would be there for use at any holiday.  So we would not be limited to Christmas.  It could an Easter house, a Fourth of July house, whatever we wanted. 

Of course, I had to wait (rather impatiently) for a few years until the child was actually old enough to stand on a chair and manipulate the decorations. 

As it happened, we built more Thanksgiving houses than anything else, but that plastic house has seen a lot of decorations over the years. 

Our first venture was when my oldest grandchild was three.  I spread icing all over the frame and Henry decorated it with candy corn and other small goodies. A fair amount of icing and decorations got eaten in the process, but everyone seemed happy with the result, as Henry's proud smile attests.

The next year, I had the rare treat of having both grandchildren for a gingerbread decorating afternoon. (My second grandchild lived in Florida and I did not always see her for the holidays.)  Both Henry and Anna seemed to enjoy their artistic efforts and we progressed to using a combination of candies and foam stickers for decorations plus some marshmallow trees.

We did also venture into other holidays, like this Halloween House.

The next two Thanksgivings, Henry got to work solo and experimented with different styles of arranging decorations and some non-traditional color schemes. And he was very proud to see his work as the centerpiece of our large family gathering for the holidays. 

But by the next year, Henry's younger sister was old enough to join the fun and make her own mark on the Thanksgiving creation. Henry and Harper each got one side of the house to decorate, although Harper seemed more interested in how much icing she could scrape into her mouth. 

Henry started to develop an elaborate story line around his decorations that involved the turkey running around the house in order to escape his fate as dinner for the pilgrims. 

That year Henry also got to design a Fourth of July house. (that still involved a lot of sampling the icing.)

As they got older, the grandchildren took over more of the design, insisting on spreading the icing and creating original works of art like Henry's turkey below. 

During the pandemic, my sisters and I collaborated to create some holiday fun for our grandchildren by doing gingerbread house building in an open garage, using a variety of gingerbread house kits.  We could get together in small groups at different tables in a protected environment that was still outdoors.  We thought it was a pretty good compromise. 

And we even had a contest for the adults, so Grammie finally got to build a gingerbread house of her own.

Over the years, I have never regretted buying that plastic "gingerbread" house and have enjoyed the many hours of fun it gave me sharing time with my grandchildren.