Gingerbread Disaster

I took a short break from posting due to the holidays. Christmas here was very different than back home. It still provided many opportunities to get together with other people and share in good food with good friends. I am blessed in many ways and this Christmas really helped me to see that. The people I am surrounded by are amazing; life here would not be the same without them. And Christmas wouldn't have been Christmas without them.

In my city there were even Christmas trees, decorations, and lights to be seen in a few sporadic places. The places where I felt most at home were those houses of other Americans. Americans know how Christmas is supposed to be, and it was nice to be in that kind of atmosphere.

I spent Christmas day mostly eating, but there was one thing that stands out as making this Christmas great. We made a gingerbread house. Now, I'm not one to get excited about buildings made out of food, and admittedly I was a bit wary of doing such a thing, but when it was all said and done with, it totally was the best part of Christmas day. After an amazing meal at a friends house, we got set up to make the house.

I don't think any of us had ever truly made a gingerbread house before, and it was just as well since we couldn't find the proper ingredients to do so anyway. (Sidenote: I spent the previous day looking for graham crackers to use in the gingerbread house. There was much hilarity that arose from me going around asking people if they sold graham crackers or even KNEW what a graham cracker was.) We all brought anything we could find that we thought might be useful in constructing the "gingerbread" house.

This was the base layer. We ended up using wafers with chocolate in between for the main part of the wall. Like I said, no gingerbread or graham crackers were available.


After the ground had been laid, we then put on the main wall which was made out of Butter Crackers. We used generous amounts of frosting as mortar to hold the whole thing together. The frosting worked surprisingly well...


We put on a second layer of wafers and then set about deciding how we were gonna make a roof. This took quite some time. Also, notice the doorway in the front. Pretty clever huh? We didn't want the gingerbread people to not be able to get in or out of their house!


This picture shows the decorations starting to appear. Somehow we came up with a plan for the roof that eventually worked. Also, candy snakes started crawling through the windows.

The whole group working together to get it right.


This shows the first layer of the roof completed. Also, if you look inside, you can see a bed made out of wafers with a gumdrop man laying on it (left of the green snake).


This is the completed house. The roof was a scramble, but I think it turned out nicely. On the top left you can see a field of red, green, and purple flowers (made out of jelly beans); beneath that at mid left there is a pool/pond with a green frog in the middle (jelly beans); below left shows the garden; and mid right shows a goat pen with goat inside (wafers and jelly bean). Use your imagination.


Close up of the jelly bean frog in the water.


Then it slowly started to buckle under its own weight.


Then it just completely gave way. We think it fell on this side because of the window we put in caused it to be less structurally sound. We should've gotten better engineers to look over our design first...


This is the final shot of the whole thing. I thought it looked kinda like a house after a tornado or hurricane rips through. Buried somewhere beneath the wafers and crackers is the poor gumdrop man who died peacefully in his sleep on his wafer bed.

Maybe next Christmas we'll be able to make a better house since we have prior experience now. Either way, it was great fun. A good Christmas day for sure.

A Large Amount of Nuts

This past Friday, I attended a Christmas party with a bunch of other Americans. The locals here, "celebrate" Christmas in some degree. The embracing of Western culture has given rise to seeing Christmas trees (fake) and holiday decorations in many of the bigger stores and malls. With that said, it was nice to be with other Americans who truly appreciate Christmas in the same way that I do; a way that has nothing to do with Santa Claus or presents.

Our party consisted of dinner, a reading of the Christmas story (Not the one that starts "Twas the night before Christmas"), singing of carols, and a white elephant gift exchange. The food was great; I knew I would miss Mexican food, but I guess I didn't realize how much I missed it until a plate of 7 layer dip was set before me. And in the white elephant exchange, I actually made out quite good: I walked away with a kilo of pistachios. Pretty good huh?

Switching gears - Within the past month or so the temperature has slowly become colder. It's still nothing to complain about in any sense; in fact, as I'm writing this it is 59° F and sunny outside. So, quite nice. But once the sun drops beyond the horizon, the temperature quickly follows suit. The thing is, here the sun has been setting about 4:15 or so and then it's nearly black outside by 4:45. It wasn't this way when I got here in October. Then, the daytime temperature was warm/hot and the nighttime was comfortably warm.

Look how happy I was in the warm weather just a few months ago.

I find myself thinking about the bounteous heat that will be afforded to my comfort this summer, knowing that at some point it will get unpleasantly hot. With that in mind, I thought it would be good to anticipate my future loathsomeness of said heat by reminding myself how much I miss it. All joking aside, the weather here has been quite moderate and pleasant; I know there are many other people around the world dealing with temperatures much more extreme and hostile than I face.

And even moreso, last winter it snowed here; A LOT. I can't complain. I'd prefer it not snow this year, though if it does, you can bet I will have a blog full of snowy white pictures.