Dreams of Sugar Plums

We are nine days into the annual December madness that comes with the Holi-daze and I have yet to catch the Christmas bug. First off, I'm having a hard time grasping the fact that it's December, 2010. Wasn't it just December 2009, like, two weeks ago? How did we get here so fast? Second, I'm in serious slack mode with decorations 'round my place. I'm traveling some for work later this month and will be spending the holidays with family out of Boston so I decided not to get a Christmas tree this year. It just didn't really make sense logistically or financially to deal with a tree when I won't be home much this month. Using this logical type of thinking when it comes to something as unlogical as bringing a live tree in ones house, I suppose, makes me the grinchiest of the Grinches (because I love the tree! It's one of my favorite parts of the holiday!) but hey, at least I'm a level-headed, common sense Grinch.

Any holiday shopping I've done thus far (which is minimal) has been online so I have yet to feel swept up in the hustle bustle of Christmas time in the city or dealt with the throngs of impatient shoppers that stirs the holiday love within all our hearts.

But I'm working on it.

I went to see The Boston Ballet perform The Nutcracker last night, I've been wined and dined through a few festive work events, and at 31, I made my first ever Gingerbread House. You may recall that last year I had two friends come over for an evening of baking. This year we decided to up the ante and try our hand at creating the ever popular gingerbread house. Initially the idea to make the whole thing from scratch - including baking the gingerbread - was brought to the table. Which I promptly vetoed. I mean, I'm all for holiday craftiness and all, but not if it takes 8 million years of intensive baking labor.

So my friend Erin went on a mission and bought us all kits at Target:


I have to say, a kit is absolutely the way to go, seeing as they are pretty much fail proof. Unless, um, your house "walls" happen to arrive already cracked, which happened to my friend Kate. Luckily there's a bit of a contractor gene lurking in her because she quickly decided to reinforce her house from the inside using tin foil. Take that engineers!

The actual building of the house was super easy. As we sipped our wine and constructed our houses I kept wondering what was with all the fuss about the difficulty of building these houses.

And then we got to the actual decorating part.

I'm sure if you're not a perfectionist, this part isn't as frustrating as it was for - ahem - three organized, type-A, precision is important type of people. (But I want the icing to be perfect snowdrifts!) Still, I think our houses turned out pretty darn cute.

They definitely look better than they taste, though. Trust me. Unless, of course, you like the taste of cardboard and stale gumdrops.

Did I mention we shared a bottle of wine while creating our masterpieces? That helped stir our inner gingerbread muses too. And helped provide some laughs.

Next stop, Martha Stewart. Merry, Merry, and a Ho, Ho, Ho.