Monday, December 28, 2009

The Making Of Gingerbread Houses, 2009

Every year, Nana likes to have the grandchildren make gingerbread houses for Christmas. No gingerbread is harmed during this exercise. In fact, gingerbread is not even used during this exercise. The childen are armed with graham crackers instead of ginger bread. All of the other participants, such as frosting, gum drops, M&Ms, etc., and the children are real.

A view of one participant working on his masterpiece.

Here we have a Mom applying gobs of cement frosting to hold the graham cracker walls together.

Future homebuilder at work applying the roof of his creation.

I can assure you that not all of the gum drops in that bag made it to his, or any other, gingerbread house.

A check of the paper plate on the right shows that most of the gum drops did make it to the paper plate.

Working, working, working.

The youngest cousin present is really checking out the task at hand. As you may have guessed, this is his first year "at the table."

Pumping his older cousin for his trade secrets.

Those fingers are stuffing a face, not decorating a gingerbread house.

It takes an industrial size mixer operated by the Construction Superintendent to make enough frosting cement for this construction job.

It may be hard to see, but he has a face full of goodies and frosting on his eyelashes.

Not much left for young beater lickers.

This one is coming together real nice.

Bracing a wall. Sometimes they had so many goodies put on a wall or roof that the wall or roof collapsed and required a redo.

Mom beefing it up with a large dose of frosting cement.