Today I made a gingerbread house with the kids. This is not it. Instead, this lovely one is via the super-cool foodie blog, Globetrotter Diaries.
If you want the instructions, click here. They use a template from Martha, but make sure you cut two rectangle-shaped roof pieces if you can't find them on the downloadable template. The recipe for both the carmel glue and the glue-like icing is fabulous. I swear I could glue a car together with that stuff.
Anyway....this is what we created:
And here's how the twee scene was: me, hunched over and uptight, snarking at both of them not to eat the frosting OR gumdrops OR peppermints. I think I even swore like a sailor under my breath as one of the walls started to topple and Theo tried to right it by throwing his whole body weight against it while Josephine wailed that he wasn't sharing.
Which brings me to a musing: I started this blog almost a year ago because I have enjoyed so much the blogs of other people. I have loved these blogs because their writers inspire me with their projects, their day to day energy, their photographs, or how they parent their kids.
And yet, as we put the finishing touches on our own gingerbread house and I took a romantic, dim-lit photo of it ("for the blog!"), I realized that I was falling prey to my own desire to make things seem too successful (think: a mommy and her two adoring children create a Martha-worthy gingerbread house with ease and no squabbling!)
I was reminded that I want this blog to be (hopefully) inspirational, but also honest about our struggles.
The desire to make things too pretty, leave out the story of struggle, is close to another assumption I have particularly around the holiday season: that everyone else is like the fun-loving people you see in the catalogues, gathered merrily around the hearth.
I should be wiser. Those people are drinking egg nog. Eating truffles, cookies, gingerbread. And they are thin.
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