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. ©

The GingerBread House 2023

 

It's starting to look a lot like Christmas around here. The photo above is of our lobby where this week the area will be filled with folding chairs and an a keyboard will be moved in front of the window on the right for several musical events on the calendar. The space is bigger than it looks in this photo and will hold 75 of us, mostly behind the gray sofa and off to the left. The door you see in far left leads to our activities room and the building you see through the window on the right is where I live. It's not much of a walk and the sidewalk is heated but this time of the year I prefer to walk across the underground parking garage to get over to this part of the campus. The piazza between these two buildings in like a wind tunnel coming off the lake and taking the outside route in the winter calls for a comb and a coat that I don't want to bother with. Way too many people in my building go across without a coat but, in my opinion, that's just asking for trouble should you fall or forget your key. A coat isn't going to prevent you from falling or getting locked out but it will keep you from freezing to death while you're waiting for help to arrive. Someone falls here in the independent the living buildings every week.

Time to get down to business and that business, today, is to do a show-and-tell on the gingerbread house that I built for the contest this year. I started buying candy before we got the kits and that was a mistake because the kits the management provided were smaller this year so I over bought. The first thing I acquired was a jar of tiny cupcake candy which was my inspiration for the theme and color scheme for what I'm calling the Cupcake Cottage. 

Before the kits arrived I built the platform for the base using two thicknesses of cardboard covered with freezer paper that I use to protect my drafting table when I do art projects. If I'm smart I'll save the base for next year's house because it was time consuming starting with tracking down a box, cutting out what I needed, taping two layers together, breaking the rest of the box down and taking it to the recycling room.

The kit and the base.

I got the bright idea that is would be easier to decorate the gingerbread house before I assembled it. But that turned out to be giant mistake because the weight of the taffy I put on the roof made it impossible to keep the roof sections in place while the frosting dried. So ended up taking the heavy taffy off and replacing it with some disassembled candy spikes that were made out of marshmallow-like disks.

With the taffy.

Second attempt without the taffy

Finally, I got the roof to stay in place but I cut down some candy canes to use for posts on the four corners of the roof to help support the weight. I didn't trust the Royal Icing to hold the roof on. It was another bright idea of mine to use Royal Icing instead of the stuff that came with the kit because I forgot to factor in the fact that I've never used it before and I wasn't sure how quickly it sets up. Thankfully, I made it in small batches and by the time I was finished I could see why my great-niece loves working with it. She makes the most beautiful cookies, better than the professional ones you pay $4 a piece for. 

The candy spike in the front of the above photo is what I ended up using for the roof but before that I had the bright idea that I could make the spikes and candy canes stand up and tower over the house by inserting them in a half a potato but the potatoes kept weeping and the frosting wouldn't set up underneath or on them.

Above is the front of the house and below is the backside. That snowman is a Peeps. I bought two packs and used just the one guy. I bought Peeps Christmas trees, too, but the color was too bright for the rest of the candy so I used ice cream cones. I did put a Peeps tree inside the house that is visible through the partly open door.

You can see the roof supports good in this photo of the back.

This is the side yard and those are pretzels for the windows. I saved some from last year's house project so I wouldn't have to buy another bag for just six 'panes'. They make cute and quick windows.

View from the top.

Those gummy worms are what I planned to used whole on a bigger house kit but I ended up cutting them up to use for siding bits and on the peak of the roof. The sidewalk is Necco's broken up with crushed shredded wheat used to fill in the cracks...the latter saved from last year's house so I didn't have to buy more cereal just for a teaspoon full.

I'm disappointed in the way this house turned out---mostly with the roof because I couldn't get the messed-up frosting under the heavy taffy off to start completely over. The Art Professor did a bombed out house in the Gaza Strip. My writing group friend took first place last year and stepped up his game this year by adding lights inside the house, sugar spun window panes and a swimming pool outside. No way can I beat him, but that's okay. He's very creative and a purist.

Speaking of being a purist, I had hoped this year they'd go by traditional gingerbread rules that everything has to be eatable. Again, they didn't have any rules other than we're not supposed to reveal who made what so it doesn't become a popularity contest. But it comes out. When we deliver our houses we have to go through the lobby where someone always sees and tells. One contestant is obsessed with the fact that we don't have to sign our ballots. She thinks someone will stuff the ballot box voting for their own house. And let me just say that that's the only way her house could win. She used yarn for the siding on the house and buttons on the roof. The roof is sitting on next to the house, unattached and off to the side because she, too, was having trouble get the frosting to hold so she named her creation Tornado House. 

Building the houses is about so much more than just the final results. Yes, it's a friendly competition. But it's also about the conversations we have during the planning stage when we bounce ideas and tips off each other. It's about the houses being on display and everyone trying to figure out what ingredients were used---Golden Grams, sugar cubes and coffee grounds to name a few that were new this year.  I'm predicting I'll take second place. Again. Third place---I'm guessing---will once again be the chefs' gingerbread house even though their window trim is falling off and piling up around the base of the house which just goes to show even the professionals can't always judge the holding power of Royal Icing.

Until Next Wednesday. ©

“The Gays” and Six Feet Under

Sometimes it’s easy to forget to filler myself when it comes to recommending a Netflix series to binge watch. At the lunch table recently, here at the continuum care facility, we shared what we were binging and without thinking of the content of my current obsession and the people present I recommended Six Feet Under to a couple of deeply religious women who have lived sheltered lives and don’t approve "the gays.” Six Fee Under is full of sex and nudity and not just ordinary sex, but gay sex. But the underlining theme in the series is so much more than that. A Rotten Tomatoes review sums it up like this: “Laced with irony and dark situational humor, the show approaches the subject of death through the eyes of the Fisher family, who owns and operates a funeral home in Los Angeles. Peter Krause stars as Nate, who reluctantly becomes a partner in the funeral home after his father's death.” Other reviews have called the Fisher family ‘dysfunctional’ and I’d agree with that but five episodes in I became fully invested in the family---flaws and all.

A Guardian Review depicts the series much better than I could ever do: “Many of the show’s themes are incredibly difficult: hard drug use, sex addiction, abortion, dementia, to mention only a few. But just like its treatment of death, Six Feet Under doesn’t insert these issues for melodramatic effect, or use metaphors or workarounds to avoid facing the hard stuff. It invests in its characters and their struggles, unpacking the issues they face and finding shades of grey and, crucially, some kind of understanding and empathy.

“Outstanding scripting is also supported by some of the finest acting seen on the small screen – there’s a reason the cast received dozens of Emmy, Golden Globe and Screen Actors Guild nominations over the life of the show, and won a swag of them too.”

Everyone's family has a one or two gay people in their midst whether you know it or not. And while acceptance is better now than in past decades it’s still got to be a scary thing to openingly pin that label on yourself. One of the Fisher brothers is gay and the writer of the series is gay. In one interview Alen Ball (the writer) shared the fact that every situation that David Fisher was in was drawn from his own life experiences living at first in the closet and after coming out. One intense episode in particular had me sitting on the edge of my bed in the wee hours of the morning fearing that David was going to end up like Matthew Shepard, who you might remember was found on a fence in Wyoming after being beaten and tortured to death for being gay. That happened not long after I found out that someone I know and love is gay and it made an impact on me. Just this year, 25 years after they found Matthew, his mother said society’s acceptance of the gay community has recently been moving backward. One step forward, two steps back. Societal changes never take a straight line, do they.

I hate that organized religion has scapegoated our fellow human beings into becoming objects to hate. Biologists can explain until they are blue in the face that same-sex activities have been “observed in 1,500 animal species, from primates to sea stars, bats to damselflies, snakes to nematode worms” but it doesn’t get through to the haters. Logic suggests that these documentations in nature are an argument that same-sex behavior is not an 'unnatural choice' at all but rather part of the Master Plan. 

Research scientists are on the edge of being able to fully understand "the interplay of genetic, hormonal and environment influences that start before birth" to cause homosexual behavior. I used to call it a birth defect but in the light of those 1,500 other species I’m coming around to not using that label. And also there is a debate going on over calling it a birth defect because on one hand that is the same as calling those born gay “a mistake” and, some say, it's not a defect that needs fixing---what needs fixing is society's mind-set on the topic. On the other hand science is close to being able to do treatments in-utero to prevent any ambiguousness in sexual orientation and why not give those babies an easier life? Wouldn’t it be interesting to be able to come back to earth in a hundred years and see how all this pans out. 

Before I end this post I want to explain what it is about Six Feet Under that I love the most besides the gifted writing and acting i.e. it’s the death and dying conversations that often gives me food for thought long after I turn off the TV. The series ran for five seasons and each episode is a half hour long and each one opens with someone dying. Things that the grieving family say or ask while planning the funeral or things said at the funeral or the way the deceased lived dovetails into the life of one of the Fisher's---what they might be going through at the time. Some of the ‘conversations’ the embalmers have with the deceased in the embalming room also make it seem like a perfectly natural thing to talk to the dead as I do to my husband from time to time. 

So, after all this if you are curious enough to try this series give it until after the forth or fifth episode before giving up on it, if you do. It’s starts off a little weirder than we’re all used to seeing on TV and it took the director a few episodes to figure out what he was doing.  It's not going to be everyone's cup of tea but I'm glad I gave it a shot. 

(Side note here: Fans of Kathy Bates will see her directing talents in five episodes and her acting skills in two seasons.) ©

Quotes from Six Feet Under---

 

Tracy: “Why do people have to die?”
Nate: “To Make life important. None of us know how long we’ve got, which is why we have to make each day matter.”

 

Brenda: “You know what I find interesting? If you lose a spouse, you’re called a widow or widower. If you’re a child and you lose your parents, then you’re an orphan. But what’s the word to describe a parent who loses a child? I guess that’s just too fucking awful to even have a name.”

 

Ruth: “Life doesn’t stop, alright. WE didn’t die. We have this precious gift of life and it’s so terribly fleeting, and that is precisely why it’s important to keep on living and not give up hope.”

 

Rabbi Ari: “Maybe your soulmate is the one who forces your soul to grow the most?”

 

Father Jack: “People might wonder what point there is in leading a life where you don’t touch any other lives. But it would be arrogant of us to assume that. Every life is a contribution, we just may not see how... Everyone comes into our life for a reason, and it is our responsibility to learn what they have to teach us.”

 

Nate: “I’m just saying you only get one life. There’s no God, no rules, no judgments, except for those you accept or create for yourself. And once it’s over, it’s over. Dreamless sleep forever and ever. So why not be happy while you’re here. Really? Why not?”

 

Nathaniel Sr.: “You hang onto your pain like it means something, like it’s worth something. Well let me tell ya, it’s not worth shit. Let it go. Infinite possibilities and all he can do is whine.”

 

Keith: “When someone sees you as you really are and wants to be with you, that’s powerful.”

 

George: “The loss of a young person is always a terrible blow, but in this case, it’s even more cruel, because Nate was an idealist and he struggled all through his life to be a good man. He wasn’t perfect, then whom among us is? And he never gave up on himself or the people he loved, or even love itself, in all its vexing, beautiful forms.”

Brenda: “All we have is this moment, right here, right now. The future is just a fucking concept that we use to avoid being alive today. So be here now.”

Father Jack: “The hardest part about my work is the fact that most people don’t want a real relationship with God. Yeah sure, they’ll pray to a man nailed to a cross, but they’ll ignore the gay kid who gets strung up, or the black man who gets dragged behind a car, or someone’s mother living in a box.”

 

Nate quoting Bhagavad Gita while high and thinking the sage words were his own.

 

Until Next Wednesday...