Tuesday, December 22, 2020

The Smell of Gingerbread

 It’s a little difficult for me to trace my direct journey from “person who likes doing gingerbread houses” to “person who makes faux-pretentious statements about gingerbread houses”, but I guess that’s part of my Christmas identity now, so let’s talk about it. I know that, once upon a time, it was just “how much sugar can I put on this piece of graham cracker, and is the answer all of it?” and so I would spend multiple hours crafting during one of my elementary school’s many winter fundraisers. There was one year I remember where making houses at home where I envisioned tiling the entire roof with Necco wafers, which were a pain to eat afterwards (Necco wafers are pretty low on the candy tier list).

Eventually, we as a family moved on to these instructional make-your-own kits, and what probably happened is that I couldn’t figure out how to make one properly so I just attached the house pieces willy-nilly and called it a day. The artistic statements came from a place of, I dunno, I guess I wanted to justify myself somehow, and people found it funny so it stuck.

So that continued for a few years. This year’s, like so much of this year, was different, and again we’re back to pre-built houses. I thought about just taking a hammer to the thing but had this vision of propping it upside-down using some candy. Titles are weird for things like this but as long as I’m uploading pictures, I might as well. Named after the Billy Bragg song, this is “The World Turned Upside Down”:


I dunno if I’m actually going to eat it. The gingerbread has historically tasted terrible for these sorts of things and my samples of the provided candy did not turn out much better, but it is nice having the smell of gingerbread this holiday season, even if everything else is falling apart.

-F


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