An Advent Memory

When I was a kid someone made one of those gingerbread houses for our family. I don’t know how or why we became the recipients of this house, but it was without a doubt the most magnificent thing to ever cross our threshold during Advent. You see, my mom had very inflexible ideas about not jumping the gun on Christmas. She referred to all Christmas parties as “Advent parties” and refused to attend them. Nor could we ever put up our tree before December 23rd--no matter how much wheedling, griping, and whinging we did to try to wear her down.

There must have been a good reason that my mom didn’t throw a tarp over the gingerbread house and wheel it into a closet until December 23rd, but she took that reason with her to the grave. Most likely she thought there was a slight chance that the gingerbread artisan would drop in unexpectedly and if the gingerbread house was nowhere to be seen, well that would not reflect well on us. Social niceties trumped religious convictions.

Whoever this person was, she was an excellent craftsperson, and she didn’t cheap out with the materials either, making use of Nilla wafers, candy canes, red hots, licorice all sorts, Chuckles, chocolate kisses, starlight mints, and Necco wafers—no expense was spared. The roof was shingled with chocolate nonpareils. That must have cost a bundle! The house also had a little multicolored hedgerow fence made of oversized gumdrops.

My brother and sister and I spent much of our free time inspecting that fabulous gingerbread house. We weren’t supposed to touch it, and it goes without saying that we weren’t supposed to nibble on it. It wasn’t actually meant to be eaten. The “gingerbread” that the walls and roof were made from was hard enough to chip a tooth and about as flavorful as a long-abandoned kitchen sponge. Still, there was all this actual candy on it. Wasn’t that edible?

Well, in fact, yes. Soon it came to my mom’s attention that portions of the gumdrop hedgerow had been “trimmed” rather severely and unflatteringly. Here and there gumdrops had been gnawed down to nubbins. The fence was beginning to look like a jaw that had had a lot of its teeth knocked out. My mom interrogated us, but none of us copped to it. Then one day I walked into the living room to find my dad, mouth open, hovering about an inch above a gumdrop, poised to engulf it!

I raised the alarm and everyone rushed into the living room. (How often do you get to nark on a parent?) Even though he’d been caught dead to rights, my dad still made a feeble denial, mumbling something about how he had just been trying to get a closer look to see if he could tell whose teethmarks were on the other gumdrops. Yeah, right.

Of course, my sister, my brother, and I had all been engulfing gumdrops whenever no one was looking. My mom was a health-food nut and we rarely got to eat sweets, so we can’t be blamed. My dad, however, was not under the jurisdiction of my mom’s antisugar laws and was always going off and buying himself half-gallons of Neapolitan ice cream and these fake chocolate eclair things called Kreme Kurls. Yet, he still found it necessary to horn in on our territory and snarf the gumdrops that, by rights, should have belonged to us kids.

Actually, we all thought the whole episode was hilarious, and after that, it was like a condemned notice had been posted on the gingerbread house. Shingles were pried off in sheets and eaten publicly. After every single candy decoration was consumed, frosting snowdrifts on the window sills were chipped off, sampled, and rejected. We took a hammer to the walls and roof and tried to eat them, which is why I’m such an authority on just how inedible they truly are. Within a few days the whole thing was reduced to rubble. What a bunch of sugar-deprived barbarians we were.