Like just about every mom, I have traditions at Christmastime. Most of mine involve baking, and one of the things my kids and I love to do is build a gingerbread house. It’s one of those activities that’s much better in theory than in practice. I imagine melting some Lifesavers for stained glass windows, dusting the roof with powdered sugar, maybe using a little cotton for smoke coming out of the chimney. These happy visions always take place before the reality of the structure is before me. Getting the thing to stand must take precedence over stained glass windows.

 

This year, the frosting wasn’t stiff enough. The walls had warped in the oven and the structure listed to the left a bit. That was okay. It still looked cute. Before we put on the roof, we made a tiny gingerbread family inside. My son came up with the idea of making a gingerbread Santa and an elf for the roof, a few reindeer shapes. He took on frosting the elf (red, of course) to match the Santa my daughter was working on. All was going well until the roof slid off the house and landed right on my son’s elf.

 

“Oh, no!” my son cried. “You crushed him!”

 

“I’m so sorry!” I blurted, picking up the roof. Constructions sites can be so dangerous.

 

The gingerbread elf lay facedown in a pool of red frosting. “The poor thing,” my son said. “You killed him.”

 

Keep in mind that we were all sugared up on Christmas cookies and overtired from a day frolicking in the snow. I began laughing at the tragic sight…the type of unstoppable, wheezing laughter that usually occurs (in my family, at any rate) during church. “Very sorry,” I managed to say. Indeed, the elf only  needed a chalk outline to finish his image as the vic.

 

My son gave me a look, then decided the whole thing was too funny to resist. He picked up a gingebread reindeer, then mimicked it trampling the poor fallen elf.

 

“Stop,” ordered my tender-hearted daughter, though she was trying not to laugh. “You’re so cruel.”

 

At this point, I took another reindeer and made it lap up some of the elf’s blood, which made my son laugh so hard he drooled. It was then we noticed the splotch of red on the roof, where the elf’s frosting had smeared. “It looks like Santa stabbed someone,” my daughter commented, and with that, we all laughed so hard our teeth chattered.

 

Well, our gingerbread house won’t be winning the cover shot of Martha Stewart’s December issues, but heck. We all sat around and made merry while Christmas music played and snow fell outside. Which is, after all, the point.

 

Any wonderfully horrible holiday disasters you’d like to share? And oh, by the way…happy holidays! See you in 2009!

 

Kristan