Let’s Make A Gingerbread House!

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Hi everybody! Today we’re going to make a gingerbread house. People often think that Christmas is all about Santa Claus and presents and avoiding that one aunt. Wrong! It’s about gingerbread houses and their contents. Come on, how often do you get to build a house out of food? Sure, you can join Habitat for Humanity and build houses for the poor, but can you eat them afterwards? I don’t think so. So stop bothering me Jimmy Carter.

Ingredients

  • 27 Nyquil cups of flour
  • a computer dash of salt
  • 2 cups of butter not used like it was in “Last Tango in Paris”
  • 70 thimbles of brown sugar
  • enough molasses to drown a pelican
  • 1 egg (a good egg, like Saint Francis of Assisi)
  • a Ziploc bag of baking powder wrapped in aluminum foil
  • whatever you need to make icing
  • a snifter of cinnamon (what’s a snifter?)
  • 3 teaspoons of ginger, or one tablespoon, or 10 wet forks
  • love

Tools

  • a caulking gun
  • a Stanley 10 inch x 3 7/8 inch Hacksaw
  • a level
  • a stud finder
  • a Craftsman 3/8 inch x 50 foot Heavy-Duty Air Hose
  • love

Directions

Take the things that need to be combined in a bowl and combine them in a bowl. This usually involves something wet and something dry and powder-like. Combine them until they are no longer individuals. Put the bowl aside, but not near the edge or it will fall on your cat who will jump and set off a series of hilarious accidents.

In another bowl (I hope you have plenty of bowls!), make the icing, which I think involves eggs and sugar. Make sure you thoroughly beat it, like a son who defeated you at basketball for the first time. Put the icing into your caulking gun. The icing is the glue that will hold the gingerbread foundation together. If it doesn’t hold, feel free to use actual glue or caulk.

Find another bowl. Now break it. You have too many bowls.

Start drawing out the blueprints for the gingerbread house, so it doesn’t wind up looking like some Frank Gehry thing that people pretend to find interesting. Take all your raw gingerbread and form it into walls and gingerbread men. And remember: its gingerbread men. Okay ladies? Stay out of this one.

Bake everything until your kitchen smells like a house for sale. Now it’s time to start building. Drive to your local Home Depot and pick up some nonunion day workers, or build it yourself. See if I care. First lay down the base so the gingerbread men don’t fall out. Then use your caulking gun to spread the icing/glue/caulk along the edges of the gingerbread walls. Fasten them in place and hold for 20 seconds, which you can time out by counting “one one thousand” or “one Chason Gordon, two Chason Gordon.” I prefer you use the latter.

After the walls are in place, you’ll need to attach the roof, unless you’re filming a gingerbread sitcom. If that’s the case, skip the roof and install lighting, and call me. I can play gingerbread.

Now it’s time to decorate the gingerbread house. Grab whatever you find, like an old Dukakis button, some cat hair, and an iPod case, and glue them to the front of your house. Aww, isn’t that pretty?

I happen to have a finished gingerbread house right here. Look how beautiful it is! It’s probably way better than yours, you fucking amateur.

Well, I hope that was helpful. Next time you hear John Lennon singing his overly morose, “So this is Christmas, and what have you done?” Tell him you made a goddamn gingerbread house. That’s what you did.

Merry Christmas and happy holidays!

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