A COVID Christmas

Last Christmas, along with many others, my family was not able to celebrate Christmas in person with my family. This Christmas, unfortunately, my mother tested positive for COVID, so we will not be celebrating Christmas as a family again! Thankfully, my mom has no symptoms and everyone else in my household tested negative! Since it now marks two years that my family has not been able to participate in our Christmas traditions, I wanted to share my favorite childhood Christmas tradition.

Like most, my family has a lot of Christmas traditions like going to Christmas Mass on Christmas Eve and then eating dinner at my Grandmothers house, not going downstairs on Christmas mornings until everyone is awake (that was a struggle as a kid), opening our presents one at a time in age order, going to my father’s house after Christmas breakfast, and my favorite the gingerbread house party.

Every year, from as far as I can remember, up until I was in high school, my mom would always host the Gingerbread House Party. This was not like any other store-bought gingerbread house building. My mom would make every house from scratch. She started by making the gingerbread from scratch, putting the dough in the fridge to cool, carving out the sides and roof of the houses,  and then baking it. My favorite part was that she would crush Jolly Ranchers and put them in the window holes before they went in the oven so there was a unique rainbow stained glass window on each house. She then melted sugar on the stove and used it as glue to stick all of the gingerbread house pieces together.

This Gingerbread House Party started out as something my mom would do every year for me, my sister, and my cousins. But after a couple of years, she started inviting the whole block! Everyone would bring their favorite candy to decorate their house the way they wanted and then would take it home. One year my mom made a total of twelve houses.

Sadly, since I am older now my mom doesn’t do this tradition anymore but I will always remember how hard she worked to build those houses and how much fun I had eating all the candy while decorating my house. I hope when I am older I can rebirth this tradition and have my kids, friends, and family comes to my house to use their imaginations and decorate their own houses!

Some photos of me decorating the gingerbread house that I salvaged off my mom’s Facebook lol!