You’ll read in just about every women’s magazine on earth that holiday traditions bring people closer together and create warm fuzzy feelings that keep us warm when it’s sleeting sheets of freezing rain outside. They push all sorts of grand-scale traditions, like decorating the entire outside of your house in hand-cut evergreen fronds and glitter-encrusted pinecones. They’re quite convincing, what with the cute illustrations of bubbly pink-cheeked families oohing and ahhing over their Christmas creations. I have a hard time resisting the bait. Martha very nearly tricked me into making gingerbread townhouse ornaments this year, which would have required such detailed icing-work I’d be in the kitchen for weeks cussing over smudgy window pane lines.

Luckily, I remembered my after-Halloween score: two “halloween” gingerbread houses, the type that come all packaged up and ready to put together, which I got them on sale for 75% off. I was thrilled with them because they are vaguely Victorian with high-peaked rooflines.

They came with a box full of orange and black icing, candy corns, and rock-hard miniature teeth-crackers which meant I had to make my own icing and round up my own candy garnishes if I were going to keep it festive. So the money I saved getting 75% off gingerbread got spent on gumdrops and m&m’s.

Geniuses that we are, we decided to have a decorating competition. Everything went downhill from there. Put two highly competetive people in a room together with too much sugar. See how long it takes before they snap and start throwing Good-n-Plenty’s at each other.

Here’s how it went down….

While I made the icing, Teague prepped the gingerbread parts. When I sat down to my house, I noticed that my house parts were all broke and crumbly while his were perfectly intact. Accident? I think not. He was obviously trying to make me lose, but I soldiered on. I iced the living hell out of all my gingerbread pieces and pulled them together into a sad, but somewhat realistic, crumbly old house.

Then he started eating all the candy in a slick attempt to leave me without building materials.  I begged, then pleaded, then downright ordered him to stop eating our supplies. I gave him an entire bag of Twizzlers in exchange for 3 untouched rolls of Necco wafers and a promise to leave enough chocolate for my doors and windows.

Everything was going well. We were having fun together, and were in the midst of some highly skilled decorating. I left the room for 2 seconds to refill the icing bag and heard a crunch. Lo and behold, my house had collapsed suspiciously while I was not in the room. It lay in broken shambles on the table. Teague urged me to give up, telling me I could help finish decorating his house instead. Very tricky, sir - but I am not a quitter. Even though I was having absolutely no fun anymore and had 4 broken walls and a broken roofline, I was determined to keep enjoying this holiday tradition.

No longer fooling around, I pulled out a glue gun. And you know what? It saved the night - and the tradition. It worked great. I put all the broken pieces together and went on to decorate a girly little house that I am quite proud of. I hid the cracks with lots and lots of candy trim. I got a little carried away, as you can see. I even made a back patio out of green frosting and broken shards of stone-colored Necco wafers.

The results of 3 hours and 6 glue sticks:

Teague, trying hard not to eat his:

Here are our gingerbread creations are, side-by-side. We decided to kill the competition since it’s pretty obvious whose house is whose.

End of day, I’m glad we did it - but I’m using the glue gun from the start next year! We decorated a gingerbread house last year with similar mixed results - you can read about that one here: http://www.ourfixerupper.com/the-gingerbread-house-a-microcosm.htm