Wednesday, December 15, 2010

Building a Small Village

Are you familiar with those little Christmas villages some people collect and decorate with?  Some have a piece or two, while others have dozens covering an entire table or mantle with the town they have collected, complete with ice-skating ponds, carolers, post office, grocery store, giant Christmas tree, etc...

Well, my kitchen counter tops are beginning to resemble one of these collections, and I am feeling a bit gigantic looking down on the town forming around me.  

A few days ago, Matt and I decided the boys would just love making their own gingerbread houses.  I got some supplies, got it all set out, then fully intended to stand back and let Matt and the boys create some masterpieces together.  One look at Matt's plan for Mitchell's house though, and I decided I had better step in and help Ben with his if I wanted it to have any resemblance to a real house (only slightly kidding here, Matt.  You and Mitchell were really on the same page with this!  Mountains of M&Ms on the roof, lava in the front yard, and a giant robot monster gingerbread man in the yard are really not traditional in this activity, but are so "Mitchell" that how can one argue?)  

It just looked like too much fun in the end to stand back and cringe every time frosting got plopped on the floor, walls crumbled to pieces all over every imaginable surface, M&Ms scattered and rolled under refrigerators and tables and cabinets.  If I have to clean this gluey, sticky mess up, I might as well get my hands dirty and get creative myself!


Well, that turned out to be just "phase 1" of the home-building project.  

Today, after Mitchell acted out being a "storm" and completely demolished his house and surrounding... decorations, we decided to tromp back to the store for further supplies.  The theme this time (chosen by the boys, not me) is ogre houses in the swamp.  My instructions as I walked the boys to school this morning were "Make sure you get ogre stuff, mom!  We need green frosting and worms and bugs and eyeballs and that kind of stuff!  Do you think you can find green frosting?"


So in addition to one normal house, one house post-tornado, and several oddly decorated gingerbread men on the side, we now add ogre huts to our "Christmas village" and I think round 3 will have to spread out into the dining room (or else we'll have to pretend to be giants and start eating.)

2 comments:

  1. oooh... this is gonna be one of my fav postings so far... loved it. so much enthusiasm on their parts once they got into the spirit of things!! Ogres at Christmas time...? why not?! :)

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  2. well, we just added the newest "Shrek" movie to our collection, so we are back into ogres full swing!

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