04.12. Gingerbread Houses

Hello, it’s the first Sunday in December! Ohhh, you already knew, well, to me it actually came as a bit of a surprise that it’s exactly 3 weeks till Christmas Day today, but that’s because my weeks are flying past me faster than I can keep up with at the moment. I have spent the week-end printing out the rest of my Christmas cards and I have ‘glitter-glue’ decorated and written about half of them. Both overseas parcels and Christmas cards are off to the post office later in the week, and that’s my Christmas shopping done :-)

I also did my Christmas decoration today, as I usually do the first Sunday in December, nothing over the top and certainly nothing like a couple of the houses in my street which seem to make a competition out of decoration their houses with as many fairy lights as possible. This picture is not from my street; I found it on the Internet the other day, I must admit it would be tempting to put up a similar ‘Ditto’ like this on my own house, just for the fun of it….do you think anyone would comment on it? :-) Well, I am happy with a simple wreath on my door and a few extra lights around the house with some decoration around. That’s it really, oh, and also some Christmas decorations my son made when he was a kid, I put them up every year too, although some of them have become a bit tatty over the years, but I don’t mind, the fact that my son made them is all that matters.

Have you ever made a gingerbread house? I used to make one every year when my son was little, and I used to make them when my sister, my brother and myself where kids, but the last house I made was in 2002 and since then I haven’t been able to go ahead with projects that require that level of physical input. I have however a WHOLE SECTION ON MY WEB-SITE dedicated to the art off gingerbread houses and at this time of year it is very well visited, especially by American and Canadian readers. Here are a couple of photos of one of the gingerbread houses I made in 2002, more like a gingerbread mansion I suppose :-) I made all of it from scratch, including the drawing and pattern for the house. I have included everything needed on my web-site for anyone who would like to give it a go; there are recipe for the dough, instructions for assembly, instructions for decoration and some gingerbread history and further links.

I have also made a separate VISITOR PAGE for all the people who have sent in photos to me of their own gingerbread houses, many of them using my pattern. It’s so fun to see my gingerbread mansion decorated in so many different variations. If you decide to make my gingerbread mansion, please send me a couple of photos for my visitor page, you will find an email link and details of what to do on the visitor page. If you want to give it a go you need to start soon, very soon, it takes a good few days depending on how big house you want to make, and if you are going for my big mansion I do advice that all the pieces are allowed to dry for up to a week after decorating before assembly, as it makes it easier to put together and less likely to crumble under the sheer weight of the decoration.

The gingerbread house section of my web-site is actually the most visited part of my whole web-site, unbelievable, since apart from the visitor page it is no longer updated :-) But it draws visitors the whole year and especially in November and December. Here in the UK, where I now live, gingerbread houses is not a tradition and I have met many people who didn’t even know what it was. I can only say that if you got children or grandchildren, this is an excellent thing to do together in the evenings now before Christmas; a great display for everyone to admire. And if you haven’t got children, so what? You can still make yourself a gingerbread house! Give it a go, it is so fun ;-)

I have added two new features on my blog today; you can find them on the left side panel. The first one is called Popular Posts and it picks the 3 most visited posts every month and gives you a snippet of the text. If the posts have any photos there will also be thumbnail photos here.  The second new feature is called Posts listed by categories, and as the name indicates, all my posts have been given keywords, or labels as they are called in world of blogging, enabling Blogger to alphabetically list all my posts according to topic and content. So for example if you want to read all my posts where I have written anything about my cat or put pictures about him, just look for ‘My cat’ in the category list. As my blog grow I might have to split some of the categories, I can see that after just a year, the Gardening category already has 60 posts and this category will probably be the one growing fastest in the future.

I’ve got a good few more Christmas cards to write and my dinner is in the oven, I better get on with it…until next time, take care :-)