Christmas Carnage

I hope everyone had a nice holiday. Our holiday has been present-free, but interesting and fun.  Over the weekend we volunteered at Toys for Tots, it was fun and very hectic.See…

Today, we had a peaceful day of food and board games. I am please to say that I still hold the title as the most winning-est player in all of Monopoly land.

To me, a simple day is best and traditions are important. One of my favorites, is building gingerbread houses. We actually build a cookie house not only for Christmas, but Easter and Halloween as well. This year we decided to try the “Village” kit.  So last night we got to work on building the five mini houses. Here are the walls ready to put together. It also came with the bag of frosting and four bags of candy to decorate with.

Then we made it to the “bare bones stage”

While the icing was drying, I decided to make cookies of the yumtastic peppermint fudge variety.

Finally, we got to decorate the houses.

Here are the finished houses and surrounding mess.

Now I have to stop this right here, because there is something else you should know. There is another major component to the holiday cookie house tradition. It is the smashing! Eating dainty pieces off the houses is not allowed. To get a morsel you MUST wait for the smashing party on Christmas night. It is similar to the grande finale in a fireworks display. It signals the sweet end of the holiday.

What do you use to smash a gingerbread house? Well, for us, it is a choose your weapon time. Tonight’s weapons of choice were a large straight wrench and a socket wrench. I nixed a customary hammer on account that my kid is much stronger now and could potentially break the table.  OK so on with the smashing!

Here are the houses set up for smash time. They know not what awaits them.

On with the destruction..Oh no, one is still standing!

Not for long…

Well there you have it. Again I hope everyone had a terrific holiday. On to New Years we go…

P.S. If you’re wondering, the kit we used is from a Canadian company called “Create a Treat”. It was very easy to put together, not to mention fun and yummy! Mostly I try to build them from scratch because the taste isn’t there in the kits. However, this one was really good.Here is their website:  http://www.createatreat.com

 

Christmas Friends

Today started off pretty normal. Got up late and rushed around to get ready for work. As I was racing around my son said, “Hey look at this.”  It was an envelope. “It was on the truck, open it!”, my son said excitedly.  Inside the envelope was a Christmas card and a hand written note dated Dec 17th that read:

“To start with I dont know your name or your son’s. I am just looking for friendship that’s all. It’s about time we met, neighbors should always be friends. I hope I didn’t offend you. That’s not my intention. Gus #4”

How sweet and special is that?

See, Gus is an older(elderlyish) man that lives a few doors down. In the past year,I have seen him stand outside his apartment  for fresh air and then disappear back in by the time I turn around. I’ve never watched him drive in or out, have any guests or anything really.  How sad that so much drama has gone on and not allowing me to realize that a neighbor might be in need of a friend. I sent him back a card and intend on bringing him a plate of Christmas dinner.

On with the rest of the day..

So I am just about to finish up work and go to open my desk cabinet to retrieve my purse which contained the keys to my vehicle. It wont open. “Oh, no this cant be happening. How does a drawer lock on it’s own???” So I call over the night manager who only has about another ten minutes left on his shift. He looks bewildered and utterly clueless as to what to do. He runs around looking for keys. There are none to be found. Now I work in a big modern office. How you have 90 filing cabinets, and not one key is beyond me. Anyway, he tries to break into it. I run around looking for anything “pick-like”. After about 20 minutes or so he turns to me and says, “Don’t you have anyone to bring you a spare set of keys?”  I weakly say no as I am thinking “Well no, smarty pants, I don’t, that is the ONLY set of keys to my truck. See I wasn’t anticipating them being locked into a Dumbo- colored cabinet tonight. Also, tomorrow is Christmas eve. How is waiting going to make it better? Do they really want to pay holiday pay to a locksmith?”

He huffs off as I state that maybe we should contact the big kahuna boss lady to see if she knows where any keys are. When he comes back he is on the phone with her. Turns out that she doesn’t know where any keys are either and this has happened before. Awesome. By now, it is a whole office adventure, people handing things over to try to pop the lock. After about another 20 minutes of struggling with it, we finally get the bottom two drawers open with the one that contains my purse. Yay! By this point I was so anxiety ridden I could have just popped.

Despite the situation being over, the stress still made me a bit twitchy by the time I got home. As usual, I check the mail and inside was a handwritten piece of mail. An awesome Christmas card from a far away friend. It was so sweet and helped to soothe my jangled nerves. It is always neat to receive mail Christmas cards because that means someone took the time to address it and mail it just for you.  We may not have any physical gifts for the holiday, but it is already turning out pretty spectacular. To all a good night…