Snap By Snap

 Do you know how many times it takes for something to become a tradition? One time. I learned this from my daughter, Amy when she was about 8 years old. One year we bought a gingerbread house kit and what do you know, it was a tradition. For at least 12 years, we have purchased a kit every year and made a total mess with it. With all the practice we've had, you'd would think that we would be really, really talented at gingerbread houses by now.

One of my own traditions is watching the yearly show about the White House Christmas decorations. As a part of that show, they always show the White House pastry chefs creating the White House gingerbread house. After all the years of practice we have had, I'm pretty sure we could compete at that level. Yep.



Half the fun of buying the gingerbread kit (besides revelling in not having to bake our own actual gingerbread) is purchasing all of the extra sugary goodies to glue on, and licking the stiff white icing off our fingers as we go. I don't know if more sugar goes in us, or on the house.

This year's effort was a kit we bought at Sam's club and it came with fondant, which we had never played with before - big excitement. If you look really closely, you might be able to tell we are new to using fondant. Of course the rest of the house looks pretty much like the one above.

Some of our Christmas traditions have been adopted from Mark's family. One of them is that we serve hot Dr. Pepper (yes, you read that right) with lemon slices during Christmas tree trimming. It originates from a recipe my mother-in-law found in a magazine, and you know what? It is really quite good. I have to say that the first Christmas I spent with the Dobbs, I wasn't at all sure about this one!

The best tradition is not really one particular thing we do. Rather, it is the value that people are more important than things. Being together trumps presents, perfection, and busy-ness. That's what the gingerbread house is really about - it's about Amy and me taking time out of a busy season to sit at the table together and create . . . a $10 house that eventually we pick the candy off of or that the dog one day licks the decor off of. This year Amy reminded me that last year I didn't really help much with the house (too busy). Obviously, it was time to fix that. So today, in the year Amy turned 20 and I turn 50, we put the original Miracle on 34th Street on TV, and sat down with a pile of sugar and some magic stuff called fondant to create this year's house. It looks just like the box, don't you think?



I guess it's a good thing that having fun being together is really the point . . . because that is what we really succeeded at!