Gingerbread Prison

There are a lot of interesting things about 12-year old boys. I'm keeping a list, and this is the most recent.

It all started with my clever little plan of turning a 1-gingerbread house recipe into a 3-gingerbread house recipe so that each child would have their own house to decorate. I foolishly skipped the important step of creating a triangular shape on the tops of the walls to support the roof and ended up making an executive decision that this year's houses would be Adobe gingerbread houses. Flat roof. I was worried the kids would be disappointed, but they really took it in stride and got right to work. Nathan asked for the pretzel sticks immediately and set them as bars in the windows, announcing that his house was going to be a gingerbread prison. So sweet. "How does Santa get in to bring the inmates their gifts?"

"They don't get gifts. They have to stay back from the windows so they don't get shot. And there's barbed wire all around, so if they try to escape, they'll get cut up."

Fa-la-la-la-la....la-la-la-la.

After a while, we stopped asking questions about the prison because there was just no way to bring it back around to the happy topic of Christmas. He had a blast decorating and was very proud of his creation. So we chose to find it memorable and humorous. And it really is.

Here's Daniel's. His gingergread man is wearing mittens so he won't get too cold going out to get the firewood:

 And here's Stephanie's. About 20 minutes later, it was bare adobe again.

 Here they are creating their masterpieces:

And here's Nathan, meticulously setting the security measures in place in his holiday house of pain and suffering:

You just can't predict these moments.