It Takes a Village . . .

Given how I feel about sugar cookies, I'm a little fuzzy on how the decision was made to make homemade gingerbread cookies.  I know it wasn't my idea.

Usually we buy one of those gingerbread house kits which the kids love to put together on Christmas Eve.  But this year, since Shaggy has been on a financial overhaul mission, we didn't buy one.  Cash is king, credit is dumb and all that witty wisdom from Dave Ramsey.

But, whatever.  That's fine.  I didn't really care if we bought a kit.  I figured we could just make gingerbread . . . as in cake.  I happen to have a nice little house shaped pan that would have been perfect.  Even picked up the candy in the bulk isle of the grocery store.  Mixing up batter and making frosting.  Fairly simple and not too time consuming.

But my idea was hijacked.

Somehow it turned into ultra-time-consiming-made-from-scratch-roll-out-gingerbread-cookies-for-building-a-gingerbread-village.  Yeah, try just saying that out loud.  Guaranteed to make you tired.

Making the dough was pretty easy--especially because I didn't help with it at all.  Aunt N took charge of that with K and S as assistant chefs.  I took it out of the fridge, sprinkled some flour on the table, and had Shaggy take a picture.  Then B started wailing, so I had to drop out of the project for a while.

Good thing N and Shaggy were around, because if they weren't, something tells me the dough would have stayed in the fridge until it was unusable and then tossed out.

The plan was to make and decorate a gingerbread house on Christmas Eve.  But because it took so very long to actually bake the cookies, we had to shelve it for several days.

The first problem was a fussy, high-maintenance baby.  The second, third, fourth and fifth problems were the other four overexcited kids vying for attention.  The sixth problem was the time consuming nature of roll out cookies.  The seventh problem was trying to figure out the shapes and sizes to make the cookies so we could actually assemble a gingerbread village.  And the eighth problem was too many people with too many conflicting opinions.

But somehow, all the dough was baked that day.

Luckily it was just the fun part left, which is probably the only reason we came back to the project at all.  We whipped up some royal icing and got out the candy.  Which caused the above mentioned second, third, fourth and fifth problems to come into the kitchen swarming like flies.

Everybody helped.  There were no casualties, though there were some tears and a meltdown or two.  But we helped the kids to raise a village.  I know it's supposed to be the other way around, but I'm still waiting for that part.