Gingerbread People - We Never Pretended To Be Martha Stewart

Things are changing with our holiday traditions.  For the first time, my youngest daughter will be hosting Christmas Day gift wrestle and dinner.  I decided since traditions are changing, that I still needed some sort of tradition that happens at my house every year.  Why?  I have no idea except I'm a glutton for punishment and attention.

For two weeks I've been assembling the goods to make homemade Gingerbread People.  That's what I'd decided, in some not completely lucid moment, would be "The New Annual Tradition At Mom's House."  I bought two kinds of brown sugar, two kinds of white sugar, ginger, of course, cookie cutters in two sexes and two sizes.  Two sexes?  Yes, one is wearing a skirt and one's not - a lot like public restroom symbols.  I bought sprinkles, colored sugar, little round dot things in red and green and those little doo dads shaped like mouse turds, in Christmas colors.  I bought butterscotch pudding in case we chose to use that recipe.  I bought three bags of gingerbread mix - just add water and egg and you're ready to go.

It took me about another week to assemble both daughters and the son-in-law here all at the same time to merrily create cheerful little brown people with cute red buttons, white curlicue hair and twinkling raisin eyes.  What it actually took was the promise of a full blown pasta meal first, then the jolly gingerbread baking.

The girls immediately swept aside my $60 worth of baking goods and decided the gingerbread mix was the way to go.  My youngest, who's not rolled out much dough in her life, got very discouraged when the dough immediately started sticking to the rolling pin.  At about this point the older daughter faded away to the living room and didn't reappear until it was time to decorate our creations.

"Mom!  What do I do?  It's sticking to the rolling pin!"

Oops, we put them too close together on the baking sheet and later had to perform delicate surgeries to separate conjoined twins.

Just because one has colorful cans of icing does not mean one has any talent using it.

And yes, those are nipples.

And so begins... or ends... one of those heartwarming traditions of the holiday season.  Will this carry down through the years, like Pa, Ma, Mary and Half-Pint stringing cranberries and popcorn for the tree on Christmas Eve?  Next year will my progeny remind each other, "Don't forget, the Sunday before Christmas is Gingerbread night at Mom's!"

I kind of doubt it.