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We had a blast building and decorating our gingerbread houses Friday night.  Mine was a failure, I built on permafrost and then an earthquake hit.  Total distruction.So it wasn’t a total loss this morning when Dinah pulled it off of the table and scarffed it down.  Kimberly’s house became a log home that suffered a similar fate, but hers remained standing, with a flat roof.Our other flat-roof home was created by Pattie, an out of town guest.Rose’s house was near perfection, and this was the first time she had ever done anything with gingerbread.Sara’s house had two moose that kept falling over.  It’ll be in the café at Gulliver’s if you want to check it out.Toni had more fun drinking than building, but her house still turned out well.And Maria’s house was a study in symmetry, I love the m&ms on her roof.Lisa’s gingerbread boasted a moose carcass in a yard full of moose droppings.Elisa’s house had a festive ‘Ho Ho Ho’ on one wall and she did me a huge favor by taking most of the leftover candy home with her at the end of the night.Thanks gals!  Everyone was a huge help with the clean-up, and let me tell you, it was a messy event.  Next year I’m going to put down a drop cloth, especially if Kimberly plans on coming I have some ideas on how to fix the structural problems some of us faced, now if I could only figure out what to do with all this leftover alcohol.  Your house New Year’s Eve, right Toni?

The holiday season, and the accompanying insanity, has arrived.  I spent all weekend baking cookies for a gingerbread house decorating party.  A batch of green sugar cookie dough for 50 small Christmas trees and 12 three-dimensional large trees. A batch of white sugar cookie dough for 39 polar bears and 12 snowmen.  A batch of brown sugar cookie dough for 59 brown bears and a herd of 50 moose.

Too many bears and not enough moose, which means that some of the 24 gingerbread people I made will get eaten by bears this year, or the bears will go hungry.  It’s a good thing the bears are small.  The gingerbread house pieces are also baked, but not yet constructed.

I still had a batch of gingerbread dough in the fridge, so today I made 40 more moose so the bears don’t starve and start going after humans.  ‘Course, it’s winter so they should be hibernating.  I also made some gingerbread snowflakes to bring in to the store tomorrow.

I’m in the holiday spirit now; I picked up some great Christmas music and listened to it while I was baking.  The Trans-Siberian Orchestra’s Lost Christmas Eve is rockin’ and I got Christmas with the Rat Pack for the traditional songs.  I didn’t get the Chipmunks Christmas, there’s something disturbing about those high-pitched voices.

Really all this Christmas Cheer has been an excuse not to write.  November’s NaNoWriMo really burned me out.  Now I’ve got to get my submission together for the Norwescon Writers Workshop, that deadline is just two short weeks away.  Ah, end of year craziness.  I’m looking forward to the frozen, calm days of January.