December 2015

My gingerbread house post yesterday failed to give an icing recipe to hold those houses together. Gingerbread houses aren’t the only thing that can be hard to hold together this time of year, and you need to know what works for you. I’ve found that a little bit of quiet time each week helps me hold it together, and most weeks I start my Monday morning alone in a coffee shop with a frothy coffee (St. Louis has a lot of great independent coffee shops and bakeries where you can still get coffee in a real mug and beautiful pastry made by hand) and some time to reflect and make decisions about how I want to spend my time that week. Often the thing that appears to be the most urgent at first glance is really not the most important thing upon reflection. The retail world may think shopping is urgent right now, but this week I decided to make gingerbread houses for the kids in my life. It’s an important tradition for us, and one that holds us together as a family from year to year. My daughter gave me the best gift of the season when she came home and decorated one for my kitchen, and I’ve loved creating the Little Flour gingerbread house kits so that other kids can share in the fun. When it comes to gingerbread houses, as my friend Emily pointed out yesterday, you really do need a good icing to hold it all together. Here is the recipe I have found does the job the best…

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Somewhere out there hangs a Norman Rockwell painting of the perfect family gathered together at home for the holidays. There’s a mom and a dad, a son and a daughter, a well groomed dog and a perfectly decorated tree. No dishes in the sink or crayons on the walls. I’m sure the leaves are raked and the laundry is folded too. At least that’s how I remember it and for some reason believed it ought to be each year. But it’s not. Not for me or for anyone else really. For years that bothered me, and if any piece of it was missing I ached for the way things “ought” to be. But there are no perfect houses – certainly no perfect families – and we can waste a lot of precious time comparing our actual lives to the fictional ones we see around us this time of year. Instead, I’ve learned a holiday lesson from the gingerbread houses we bake each year. If I try to make them perfect, no one has any fun. It’s okay if the lampposts are different heights and someone ate the other half of the roof. There is no reason you can’t put stripes on the walls or Minions in the living room. There is no such thing as too many M&Ms, and Bugles make the best kind of trees if they don’t all get eaten in the car on the way to grandma’s house. In other words, gingerbread houses can be a bit messy and every one is different. That’s what makes them fun. This year we’re baking gingerbread house kits (cows and minions optional) and delivering them to some of our special young friends to decorate. They won’t be perfect, and we wouldn’t want them to be.

If you’d like to make an imperfect house for someone in your life (or yourself-you’re never too old for gingerbread!), here is our favorite recipe for easy cutting, long lasting, and delicious gingerbread. The whole process is made easy with these great gingerbread house cookie cutters!…

Holding it all together

No Perfect Houses

Archives for December 2015