Every year I buy a gingerbread house kit and we decorate it (if you’re going to buy a kit, look for the ones that come with the plastic tray with the channels in it – this way you can assemble the house and decorate it right away since the channels keep the walls up). This year, I didn’t buy one, planning instead to make my own. That’s what Martha would do after all. Well, here we are just a few days before Christmas and I never got around to it. I did actually find and print out the recipe on Martha’s site, but I was discouraged by the fact that the template made 5 tiny gingerbread huts instead of one big house.

The great gingerbread debacle of ’08 came to a head the other night when the children complained about us not having one and how much they wanted to do it. Sigh. So Mr. MarthaAndMe made a quick stop at Bed, Bath and Beyond and grabbed a kit.

We assembled it as tradition dictates. Mr. MarthaAndMe does the actual construction. Each child gets to do a side to his or her specifications. I do some of the front and try to create some kind of uniformity. The dogs wait under the table for pieces of candy to drop.

This year, I followed Martha’s lead and made gumdrop snowmen, like she has on page  53 of December Living. I’m rather proud of mine (Mr. MarthaAndMe says he appears to be French with a beret and scarf) and mini-Martha made a fishing Cyclops.

This gingerbread house isn’t nearly up to Martha’s standards (the kit didn’t come with very much frosting, so the house seems kind of bare to me), but we had fun making it.

My Snowman

Cyclops fisherman