Building gingerbread houses with the United Way has been apart of our annual Christmas celebration for a few years now. I’m not sure how many more years we’ll get to take the girls but we managed to squeeze in at least one more year! I suspect the ‘bigs’ won’t want to hang with us much longer…
I look forward to this event every holiday season. Maybe it’s the sense of community there, maybe it’s the fun the girls have, maybe it’s hanging out with friends….and maybe it’s all the candy. The United Way does so much within our community, it’s a fun way to be able to support them, too.
I need to go back through the pictures to see just how many years we’ve been going { we think it’s 5 now } to see how little they were when we started! HERE is a blog post I did at some point – look how little those girls were!!
Wait, wait!!! HERE they are even smaller!!! Oh my heart!!!!
This year it was held at the Museum of Industry in Stellarton. It’s nice to see various venues being used for this event. I just hope the carpet recovered from it 😉 We met Angela and her girls there and got down to business. So much yummy candy to decorate with and snack on. And the icing may have been tested out, too….
The girls have fun and sometimes it gets a little crazy. But the decorative freedom is theirs and so away they go. Lena clearly is her mother’s daughter, with shutters and window boxes on her house. Hannah is her own person so she did what it takes to make a candy cane stand upright on the roof….
I think they always start out with good intentions. They work away with a clear game plan in place…
And when things go off the rails, then you grab life by the roof and just bite into it!!!
Do you think Hannah had a litttle too much sugar? No, me either….
I honestly can’t recall if Santa showed up other years or not, but he did this year and I loved watching Lena and Abbie interact with him. They know where things stand, but still couldn’t resist the chance to get a picture with Santa. The best was when Santa informed us he knew these two well and knew they were good kids. More than just being Santa, he happens to drive a local school bus when he isn’t too busy overseeing the production line and elves up there at the North Pole. How can you resist that glint of mischief in his eye?
If one of your local chairties puts on this type of event, I highly recommend you take your kids, or borrow someone else’s and go. You are supporting your community, you get to enoy watching your children create and the highlight for me? You don’t have to make the gingerbread nor clean up the mess afterwards!!
Us? We’ll be hanging onto this tradition for as long as we can!!
To be continued,
Lori
