I was given my first ever gingerbread house kit this December, by big sis Liz. With gingerbread houses, you only get one stab, so I was determined not to waste that stab. I therefore invited a few of my most artistic friends round to help with the construction work. You’d think it’d take an hour or so at most; it actually took a whole weekend.
The reason was that we were determined to make this the most original and colourful gingerbread house out there. We’d waited 24 years of our life to finally be trusted to make something like this, and the time had now come… It’d have a door number, stained glass, a fishing pond, a snowman, a croquet lawn, a snowman playing croquet, a fire for marshmallow roasting…it’d have everything.
‘Twas a messy weekend, with regular trips back and forth, to and from Tesco, however we finally completed the masterpiece:
So that was that – our house was built. A dreamy, edible house. It started to melt quite soon after we’d christened it, and someone (still waiting for the guilty to turn himself in..) ate the chimney off within 4 days of its construction. So it seemed that we’d built our house upon the sand.
I was pretty proud, nonetheless…until I went to my little cousins’ house, just before Christmas. We’re talking little boys and girls, ranging in age from 8-12. They had templated, designed and baked their own houses, giving them individual themes, eg ‘prison’, ‘chocolate house’. The aim, it seemed, was to pile as many sweets as possible onto each of them. The fourth (I wasn’t allowed to photograph it, as it had collapsed and wasn’t fair), had submitted to the obese amount of chocolate that had been piled upon it.
We were thrown slightly off-kilter. A) they were too young to be dabbling in house building (such things can be dangerous), and B) they’d done it better than us. So next year, the competition really begins. I’m going to get my architecture friends round, we’re going to design our own gingerbread tiles, and build our house upon the rocks. Just you wait..
Nell Fane 