House Captain Feature: Gingerbread House
Since Christmas is coming, there have been several Christmas house activities to make the last days of school fun! One of them includes the gingerbread house decorations! Decorating gingerbread houses has been a Christmas tradition dating back to the 19th century. Germany started the gingerbread house tradition when the brothers Grimm wrote the timeless tale "Hansel and Gretel." Decorating gingerbread houses in house teams is a great way to show our house spirits!
As the class before lunch started, a lot of students are already seated up and ready in the PTA cafe. As our team was about to start the competition, I was both nervous and excited, since I’ve never decorated a gingerbread house before. I was curious how it would turn out, but I was surprised how experienced some of my group members were. We built the structure of the house efficiently together and had a lot of time to decorate it. When we were decorating, we all had different jobs. Some members used the green and red frosting to color the roofs, and some members colored in the gingerbread men and other cookies. Others put ornaments like door wreaths onto the house. All of that went fairly well.
In the middle of decorating, we decided to put a chimney onto the roof of the house. This was when we had different opinions. Some of us wanted to make the house perfect and wanted to add the chimney. Some, however, didn’t want the chimney because they were afraid that the house would fall over. At last, we decided to try to put the chimney on. Some people held the gingerbread pieces while other used white frosting to stick them together. The whole process was rather hectic, and after the chimney was up, the roofs started to slip. We started to panic. We tried hard to hold the roofs up, but after a while it would slip again. We also frantically put on layers and layers of frosting, hoping that it would stick the roof still. Out the corner of my eye, I saw another group’s gingerbread house completely falling over and was even more nervous about our house that was barely standing. In the midst of the chaos, Sarah from our group suggested that we must hold the roofs for a longer period of time for the frosting to dry. We agreed. Guess what? Our gingerbread house did not fall apart! We finished the house with a big smile and set it up into the box.
This is the first time the house mentors of BIBA organized a gingerbread house competition, and it turned out amazing! It was fun to share our different ideas, when when we had different thoughts. Our green group did not place, but it did not matter anymore…because we all had the time of our lives!