Cookies and Gingerbread Houses on Disaster Lane

I woke up this morning thinking I had a dozen Christmas tree cookies lined up on my kitchen table ready to decorate. I didn’t. I baked them in my dreams. Once again I'm wishing against all odds and common sense that someday it will be proven that our dream life is one we actually live in an alternate universe because I do some pretty awesome things when I’m thrashing about in my bed. If you could see the mess my sheets are in when I wake up you’d know that “thrashing” is a good word to describe what I do at night. The only time I sleep like the dead is when I’ve taken an Ambien and I try not to do that unless there’s a full moon and I’ve remembered that fact early enough to pop one of those pills.

I probably dreamed I was baking cookies because several of my fellow residents had a cookie baking production line going to make gingerbread cookies for our upcoming cookie decorating party. I signed up for the party right away to get one of the twelve available spots. I did it last year and I had a frustrating-but-fun time trying to keep up with the others who’ve had years of experience as mothers and grandmothers painting cookies, while that was my first experience. I’m super competitive with anything crafty so the pressure is on to see if I learned enough last year to decorate some cookies I’m not ashamed of and won’t have to eat right away to hide the evidence. As a kid my mom did bake cookies around the holidays but nothing that required putting frosting buttons and bows or faces on baked goods. I’m writing this on Sunday and the event takes place on Wednesday so you won’t see any cookie photos in this post. 

What will happen in time to share in this week's post is the results on who won the gingerbread house building contest---results are due on Tuesday. You would not believe the controversy the Art Professor’s bombed-out house in the Gaza Strip caused. Last year they kept the houses on display for several weeks, including while and after the voting took place. This year they pulled them down and tucked them out of sight after only 4-5 days. Then the kitchen manager sent out an email with photos of all the houses and gave us just a few days to vote. 

The night before the houses disappeared I got a phone call from woman who was looking to rally support for going to the management and asking them to take the bombed-out house out of the show. "A gingerbread house contest is no place for a political statement," she said. Can you believe that? Not the part about it being the wrong place for a political statement but the part about being so offended that she and a few others thought it should be removed and they were willing to take action to make that happen. This is what intolerance leads to---fighting over something as insignificant as a gingerbread house in a senior community.

Several people did confront the Art Professor face-to-face while the houses were on display but she said she’d been involved in showing and setting up art displays for years and is used to defending controversial pieces on display. I felt bad because I was one of the people at a lunch table one day who encouraged her to build a gingerbread house knowing full well what theme her house was going to be. 

The person who called me even claimed that one of the professor’s former students probably built the house for her and she should be disqualified on that count alone. She says that because the professor has macular degeneration and that was her only proof. One of the houses was built by a group of people in the Memory Care building. Should they be disqualified? Should the couples who built a house together be disqualified? Such silliness! I doubt it is true that she didn't build the house. There was certainly nothing precise or complicated about the house, but even if she did have help, so what?

Another lady said, “Christmas is a time of joy, this [house] doesn’t belong here.” Two wars are going on in the world and this woman---who goes to church nearly every day---is not willing to be reminded that not everyone’s Christmas is going to be filled with sugar plums and carefully wrapped gifts? She has a right to an opinion but why make a big deal out of it? Tell your friends you hate the house. Don’t vote for it. But what gives anyone the right join an effort to have the house removed thus canceling out the professor's first amendment rights? I wish I had said that to Ms. Offended as we stood looking at the houses on the first day they were on display. Instead I said nothing except “it makes my house look better” and I’m ashamed of that. I should have said something to defend the right to be different in a contest with no rules. I should have said we're never going to achieve world peace if we won't/don't acknowledge the sufferings of others. 

By the way, one of the women rallied against the bombed-out house is the same woman who was responsible for the renaming of the ‘Secret Society of Liberal Ladies’ dinner group to the ‘Tuesday Dinner Discussion Group.’ Another concession to Ms. Offended we made is instead of eating at one large table we broke up into three tables and rotate who sits where so we don't call attention to ourselves. We're more secretive now than before which is ironic when you think about how we used to made our Tuesday reservations out in the open as the Secret Society of Liberal Ladies. It was a playful joke, until it wasn't.

Back to business: Whoever took the photos of the houses, didn’t do a very good job which I can’t help thinking had a bearing on the results---some people didn’t even have time to see them in person. And the controversy sure put a damper on the results. The house at the top was my Cupcake Cottage and it won First Place. The next three houses below were built by my friends.

 

 Built by my writing group friend

My writing group friend and his wife made this one. It's hard to see in this photo that the tree in the window has working lights and the window pane itself is made of sugar as is the 'green water' feature in the front. The Royal icing has the cutest footprints in the 'snow' and the tree in back is made out of spearmint candy and is absolutely perfect and looks like a high end, carved candle.

Built by the Art Professor

This is the bombed-out house. Coffee grounds were rubbed into the gingerbread to make the walls still standing look charred. I never got a chance to photograph the paper that went with the house (or any of the houses for that matter) which told the symbolism of the elements that were used. The house was named after one that Oppenheimer had lived in while working on the Atomic bomb.

The pink yarn house below was made by a former kindergarten teacher---she's The Cheerleader if you're a long-time reader of my blog. It's a godawful house in my opinion but the woman is such an upbeat and playful person to sit next to at the lunch table and whenever I get that chance to do that I know I'm going to have fun. She went around telling people not to vote for her house, that it wasn't a serious entry.

Built by The Cheerleader

Below is other samples of the houses submitted. I don't know who built the first two houses but they were cute. 

Built by the Memory Care Building residents

 

For some reason they didn't name a 2nd and 3rd place. I haven't been out of the apartment to find out what the gossip machine has to say about that. But nothing about this year's contest was 'normal' by comparison to last year. The barn you see in the background in one of the photos above kept falling apart and the window trim on another house kept falling off. They'd get repaired several times a day but the frosting or glue used wouldn't hold. (Maybe this was a contributing factor on why the houses disappeared earlier than expected?) The pink yarn house never got the gingerbread roof put on. It was sitting off to the side, the victim of a strong wind according to the builder's note. Oh, and I thought it was totally unfair that the kits provided weren't all the same i.e. we didn't start out on an even playing field. The lean-to cottages took less candy and time but it would have been harder to be inspired with less 'canvas' to work with. Anyway, the theme of this year's show could easily be called The Houses on Disaster Lane. Winning first place felt like a hollow victory.

Until next Wednesday. ©

Wind-up to a White Christmas!

It’s Thursday night as I write this. The winter blizzard that as been crossing the country finally hit my side of Michigan. We’re supposed to get a sizable amount of snow dumped on us before the storm leaves our area on Saturday night. Temperatures are in the teens and the winds coming later tonight are predicted to cause whiteouts with snow blowing sideways and drifting on all the north/south roads. We were supposed to have a choir entertain us tonight but that got canceled and judging by the rolling message at the bottom of my TV screen just about everything going on in town got canceled for tonight and tomorrow.

Our activities director let us know our Christmas party entertainment for Saturday night, however, won’t get canceled because the one man band lives here on campus. And I’ve met the guy! He’s a new resident here, and he’s the husband to the woman with dementia who I wrote about a few posts ago while attending a meeting about dementia support. I found a video of him playing at a polka festival last summer. His introduction promo claims he’s “shared a stage with the Four Tops, The Coasters and many other popular artists.” I can’t wrap my head around that kind of music at a Christmas party but I’m bidding his accordion can play just about anything. I wish I could find a way to bring my brother over from the next building for the show. He used to play the accordion.

I’m worn out already. I’m not cut out for all the socializing this holiday bought with it and I’ve still got the holiday buffet and the above mentioned entertainment to go to here and a family party off campus at my great-nephew’s house on Christmas Day. This past week-end we had a sing-along (great fun and I'm surprised I knew most of the words to Christmas songs I rarely listen to). 

Another afternoon I took part in a gingerbread cookie decorating class. For the artist I wish I were, cookie painting was frustrating! I made eight cookies but I only liked the way two of them turned out meanwhile others in the room made such cute cookies that I had cookie envy. Can you believe it, I’ve never done Christmas cookie decorating or cookie exchanges since I was a kid helping my mom. I was a babe in the woods surrounded by super moms and grandmothers with tons of experience. 

Within two days I’d eaten the ugly cookies I made and I intend to take the good ones down to my brothers this afternoon, but I’m wavering on that idea. I’m worried his grandson’s wife will have sent him some in the mail. She’s been posting photos of the ones she’s baked and decorating and they look so professional. Mine by comparison look like a child did them. Ya, I’m that petty competitive.

My great-niece-in-law's cookies

My sad attempt at Christmas cookies

Another morning I spent writing my annual Christmas letter but when I went to print them, my printer wouldn’t work so I ended spending the afternoon hand addressing envelopes and writing notes in cards. My printer picked that time to tell me the ink pads have reached the end of their life. When it tells you stuff liked that it doesn’t give you a warning, it just quits working. I had just installed $80 worth of ink cartridges I can't return, so I was more than upset.

I found directions online for how you change the pads and it's a job I won’t tackle and the Epson website lists a place that is out of business as their authorized service center here in town. I read half an evening about the printer problem I learned there is a way to reset your printed page counter to ‘trick’ your printer into thinking you haven’t actually printed as many pages as you have and that gets you another 1,500 pages out of the black ink pad but it takes a download and a one time code from the Epson company which after talking to them for a half hour they wouldn't give me because the printer is out of warranty. A real catch 22-22. There's a black market download you can buy for $8 but I'm leery about putting something on my computer from an unknown source.

Another Christmas related thing I’ve been doing was just as frustrating as the two things up above…making stuff to past around at the parties. As I mentioned in another post I wanted to use up the pretzels I had left over from making the gingerbread house so I planned to dip the small ones in chocolate and cover the with the green sprinkles that came with the gingerbread house kit and arrangement them in a wreath shape (like the one pictured above) but do you think I could find those packet of sprinkles? No, I couldn’t and I turned this apartment upside down looking for them. I ended up rolling them in pecans instead. After finishing up that job, I grabbed a plastic bag out of my storage drawer to use for trash and there in the bottom of the bag were the sprinkles. Jeez!

On Christmas day---unless Covid or the weather cancels out the plans---my nephew is picking my brother and me up to spend the day at my brother’s grandson’s house. The people and the kids who will be at the party are all super nice and I’m looking forward to that part but the house we’re going to has bathrooms that are no where near old people friendly. The guest bathroom was built kid-friendly and the toilet is literally a child’s size and there is nothing to grab on to to help you get up. The setup in the master bath isn't much better so I learned the only way to do parties there is to not drink anything the day before or day of the event.

Hope your windup to Christmas as been less frustrating than mine! Then again, maybe being frustrated and crazy busy is part of the holiday fun. ©

The Christmas Letter

 

My Christmas cards and letters were dropped in the mail last week. I've been doing letters for well over a decade and the people who get them tell me I can’t stop now. They don’t take me long to write but it’s always hard to know how much of my life to reveal to my “brick-and-mortar” friends and family. (Can that term even be applied to people or is it just reserved for businesses?) Anyway, the blogging world is used to me spilling my thoughts all over the place but the people in my everyday world don’t have a clue what goes on in my head or my daily life, for that matter, and probably don’t even care if truth were known…except at Christmas when they get The Letter. That’s life. I won’t reprint the entire letter here but to give you a taste of what I wrote this year here’s the first paragraph:

Dear Friends and Family, 

Have you ever tried to write an annual Christmas letter and after a few false starts you decide your life is so boring that no one will get past the first paragraph before tossing your letter in the trash? Where do I start my 2014 letter? Nothing great happened this year, nothing bad either. And I didn’t take an exotic vacation you’d enjoy hearing about, although I did sit through a travel lecture on South America. Does that count? I didn’t take up drinking hard spirits or join a cult that chants before breakfast either in case you were holding your breath on those life changing choices that I’ve put on a shelf for someday maybe. Still, I went through my day planner looking for amazing and engaging data to jump-start this letter. January, February, March---yadda, yadda, yadda---all the way through to December and not a single thing had been penciled in worth sharing unless you want to hear about my shoulder surgery the end of October. Not to worry, I still have an arm and even though my surgeon has benched me from shoveling snow this winter, I’m thinking a long extension cord and a hair dryer might work to clear my sidewalks the next time it snows.

Then I went on to describe my adventures online and at classes I took during the year ending with a Facebook invitation to anyone who knew my parents and might want to see the photo essay book I just finished that covers their life spans. “I’m Jean R*****” I wrote, “if you want to send me a Facebook friend request. I only mention the name thing because there are people in my life who still don’t understand that I never took Don’s name when we got married. Note: I love you all anyway but when I die, I hope you remember who I am when the obituary gets written or read. I’m old and I have to worry about something.” Yup, I’m a product of the Feminist Movement, hear me roar which obviously not everyone has. I must be meowing like a kitten instead. And that explains why one of my nieces thought a hospital lost me a few years ago. 

By the way, once in a while people I’ve met in cyber space have asked to friend me on Facebook but I have never wanted to mix my “brick-and-mortar” family and friends with my cyber space friends. I still believe that’s the best thing for me to do to protect the privacy of my extended family. So 99.9% of the time I don’t accept friend requests if I don’t know the person face-to-face. Just thought you’d like to know in case you’re not Asha or Pam who make up that .1% and I have known them since shortly after Don's stroke.

Darn, it’s time to hop in the shower. I have to drop Levi off for his haircut, go get one of my own then brave the busy stores before swinging back around to pick up the dog. This week my day planner also includes a Christmas party and my movie and lunch club. Life, at the moment, is good here on Widowhood Lane. Thanks to my cleaning service, the house is sparkling and I even have Toll House cookies in the refrigerator to bake in case anyone wants to stop by between now and the end of the year. If no one does come to visit “the old widow” you’ll know what I’ll be doing on New Year’s Eve…drowning my sorrows in a glass of milk along with the German chocolate cookies. ©

P.S. Here’s a link to another post about the letter I sent out the first Christmas after Don passed away. Come the middle of January it will be three years since he died. Sometimes that seems like a 100 years ago and other days, it seems like only yesterday.