Gingerbread House

Last Thursday afternoon Mr. Trouble on Feet’s third grade class was making gingerbread houses. Parents were invited to join the mayhem to help their favorite student. At first I was not planning on going because we were having a tremendously busy week, and our host daughter had just arrived from Eastern Europe through Project 143.

But after she and I had eaten a peaceful lunch, I asked her if she would like to go to the school and help Mr. TOF make a candy house, and she was thrilled with the idea, so we went and surprised him. It was mayhem like you can only imagine with 30 some students and their parents crowded into a classroom working with frosting and every kind of candy you might consider. I watched some third graders literally throw fistfuls of candy into their mouth and chew with bulging cheeks. It was a hopping place!

Mr. TOF was eating candy every time he thought I wasn’t looking, and it didn’t take long for our host daughter to catch on! He was so distracted with everything going on that it took some redirecting back to the house we were constructing. The first thing he made was an elegant curving sidewalk, and then a lovely fish pond for his Swedish Fish, followed by a green gummy wishing well on the lawn. When are we getting to the house? I wondered. Eventually we moved on to the roof. He had plans for a certain candy pattern on the roof, but that plan changed about eight different times because every time he went to the supply table to get the candy, he got distracted by all the different kinds of candy, and ended up forgetting to get enough of the right candy. He’d get back to his house only to realize that he didn’t have enough, and then by the time he was back at the supply table, that candy had been all used up. Repeat and repeat.

The front of the house was built with a bit of care: a door constructed from pretzels, a specially selected door knob. There were special heart shaped candy cane windows on the side of the house, placed carefully. And then, it was sort of like Mr. TOF and his counterpart realized that Mom does not necessarily have a plan to prevent us from eating this whole house when we get home. They didn’t say this out loud in words, of course. I was sitting right there. From that point on, however, they just randomly loaded the roof and back of the house with as much candy they could fit onto the graham cracker walls, as fast as they could cement it on with frosting, and it was all about which candies might TASTE the best.

Oh my word.

At this point my knees needed a break, so I stood up and looked around at all the other parents and students. Some kids were there without anyone to help them, happily tossing candy right down their throats with glee! Some students were executing carefully organized plans of how they wanted their house decorated, with candy lined up in rows on the walls and roof of their house, each part decorated with a specific kind of candy in a very organized way. Some students had amazing crafty parents who were helping them do things like making a toothpick picket fence around the front yard of their house, or making grass out of sprinkles, and glitzy trees out of ice cream cones and sprinkles. Some parents and children had houses with a color scheme. Some houses were pristine and delicate with elegant swirls of frosting.

Each house was different, and there was definitely no other house like ours. I think our house might have been one of the heaviest, however. It isn’t shown in the picture above, but there was a LOT of candy glued to the back of Mr. TOF’s house.

The ever wise third grade teachers (all the third graders in the school were making gingerbread houses) had procured permission for their students to leave early with their parents, so we bounced right out of the school with our house an hour early, (well, they bounced, and I shuffled in an utterly overstimulated daze) and then I sent them outside to burn off all that sugar.

Bless those third grade teachers, and the poor janitor. Their students were truly having so much fun. The classroom was such a mess! The teachers just patiently steered people to to the door, but I was actually grateful for the experience of decorating the gingerbread house WITHOUT having to be the person organizing it myself.