gingerbread decorating is serious stuff

You wouldn't know it from the pictures but the kids really did enjoy decorating their little gingerbread houses. It is a tradition of ours to decorate the houses sometime in early December. Sam has, from the first time we first decorated a gingerbread house, been all about minimalism. He has perfected this tecnique of putting frosting to each candy without getting it on his fingers at all. Heaven forbid he get his fingers dirty! He studies his house and his choice of candies and makes a plan and then gets started. He's usually finished in all of fifteen minutes. My girls, however, are a different story altogether. Teresa could bathe in the frosting and it wouldn't bother her a bit. She dabs her fingers in it, smears it across the roof and does not stop until she has run out of frosting. Katie is not quite so hands on but getting a little frosting on her fingers means she gets to lick it off her hands and that there is reason enough to decorate a gingerbread house. The girls tend to haphazardly decorate; jumping from door, to roof to walkway. Katie often decides Teresa's ideas are exactly what she was planning, which annoys her sister to no end. They bicker, I say decorating will be over if fighting doesn't stop and there's a truce for a few minutes. Until Teresa uses Katie's candy or Katie copies yet another one of Teresa's designs. Teresa keeps globbing on frosting and candy until her roof can hold no more. While Katie tries to keep up but loses steam before Teresa does. When we first started with this back when Sam was three and Teresa just over a year, I had to hold myself back from "fixing" their handiwork. I've come to realize though, that their creations are far more whimsical than anything I could dream up. Now I just sit back and let them show me the right way to decorate a gingerbread house. The finished houses are unique, despite the copying, and delightful to behold.