Gingerbread

This has become a much anticipated tradition started by my lovely cousin, Kylie. All year we save whatever candy we can talk our children out of from the many, many holidays and birthdays that seem to completely revolve around sugar. Then, right before Christmas we come together and glue it onto whatever baked architecture we come up with that year. One year it was graham crackers. This year we got to compare Ikea, Trader Joe's, and Bed Bath and Beyond houses. Conclusions: Ikea tasted better and "pepparkaka hus"is WAY more fun to say over and over, BB&B held up better, but was hard to put together with those darned slanting walls.  All that candy is a surprisingly heavy burden for a gingerbread roof. The TJ's a-frame is by far the easiest to build, which is a huge plus.

Apparently Kylie's children are easier to talk out of the smack than mine, because holy sugar rush, Batman! She had a tableful of the stuff:

Not everyone did their part in ridding the cupboards of the sweet burdens we were hanging on to. We had a few minimalists:

 Some of it was eaten before it made it on to the house:

But Kylie made up for all of them with her unflagging persistence to USE IT ALL, BY GOD!

Which paid off tremendously with this masterpiece:

Because it was a big family event, it, of course, was not without it's drama. But being able to pour (another, please) very full mug of wine and sit back and enjoy our little village full of memories of Easter, Halloween and birthdays past was worth all the sticky fingers and low blood sugar tantrums: