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The wonderful awfulness that is a Christmas Concert
Last night we had the privilege of attending my oldest niece’s first choral performance. She’s ten. It was a Christmas concert of sorts with songs played by the beginner band and songs sung by the chorus. The kids had been practicing for about three weeks. Which pretty much meant they were rough, squeaky, awkward and totally fourth graders. It was absolutely lovely. I almost cried.
I’m sure there will come a time in my near future when I will dread having to squeeze in yet another one of these concerts but this one was more beautiful to me than thousand-dollar box seats at the opera. Perfect performances are boring. Imperfect ones are lovely. From the tape peelings left from posters being ripped off the lunchroom wall to the uncomfortable metal chairs that were too close to your neighbor for comfort to the innocent freckled bubblegum cheeks of pre-puberty…I just wanted to capture it and put it in a jar.
So I made a horrible movie instead. I think I got another grain of sand in my camera because my lens has a terrible time focusing. (Blast it. Never buy a Canon TX-1.) I think the awfulness of my movie-making sort of goes with the theme of perfection being overrated though. I just had to share it with you even if it makes you squint and curse my camera skills under your breath. Life is blurry and wiggly sometimes, you know?
The whole event brought back waves of memories that nearly squished me with sentiment. I remember being in chorus. I remember singing so earnestly, standing up there on those creaky old thin carpet-covered bleachers. I remember trying to harmonize when I didn’t even really know what harmonizing was and crooning off key like a dying cow. I don’t think the teacher ever noticed me but that might be the reason I never made it to “Show Choir.”
I remember the fart jokes and the nervousness about my clothes not matching quite right. I remember hours and hours of examining the kids’ heads who stood in front of me. I remember one girl had so many zits on her back it nearly drove me insane just looking at them. I remember it all like it was yesterday.
How did my little niece get to be ten already? I just want to go to school with her every day and fight off the icy chunks of insecurity that come raining down like hail for no reason at all. I just want to meddle and fix and make everything okay so she can be the innocent child that I love so much forever and ever! But I can’t. I can’t hold back her curiosity for the future. I can’t stop time. I can only wince and record it.
It’s all so beautiful.
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Operation Gingerbread!
At last my top-secret operation has been revealed! I like to call it “Operation Gingerbread.” Like all top-secret operations, it had phases. Three of them. Phase One was the cardboard-box version that I posted about over on Alpha+Mom. Phase Two was a real gingerbread-cookie house and Phase Three is still yet to be done but involves freezer paper, a t-shirt and a gingerbread man illustration shouting “Catch me if you can!” Stay tuned for Phase Three.
For Phase Two we brainstormed and did our research. We may or may not have gotten some inspiration from a Sur la Table catalogue and Mars (via Bug’s antennae). I LOVE gingerbread now. It’s so pretty, cute and delicious all at the same time! I almost love it as much as I love hedgehogs (which is huge). I have a feeling December’s banner may involve some gingerbread…
I might not have fallen so hard for gingerbread if I hadn’t stumbled across a giant display of this mix at my local grocery store. I don’t usually like to push products on this blog (and I’m not getting any kickback for this) but Krusteaz makes the best mixes!
I guess I’m a bit sentimental about Krusteaz because when I was in college (and starvingly poor) my dad got a job as a grocery broker representing Krusteaz. This meant he went around to all sorts of grocery stores to make sure their product was up to code and looked nice on the shelf. As a side benefit he got to take home the out-of-code boxes of pancake mix and brownies, etc. Sometimes my mom would send these out-of-code boxes to me in big care packages.
Let me tell you, there is nothing as delicious as FREE food when you are a starving college student. I was pretty much surviving on spaghetti noodles, ketchup and the stale biscotti from the break room at my job. Getting a box of cake and brownie mixes in the mail was like a gift from heaven back then. These mixes were especially great because most of the time all you needed to add was water. Perfect for a college student who has no cooking skills and not a thing in her refrigerator.
But I digress. I recommend this mix because it’s easy, it tastes good and it smells DIVINE!!! If you need a little kick to get in the holiday mood, bake a batch of these and next thing you know you’ll be sniffing the air and singing Christmas carols.
We had so much fun making and decorating the cookies that I made three batches of them. One with Jen and her family, one with my nieces and then one with the kids I babysit. It’s super-easy and always a crowd pleaser.
Making the house, however, was a bit more challenging. I’ve never tried it without a mix but it was plenty hard (for me) with the mix. I’m sure JustJenn would disagree but then she’s a baker AND an architect—which is not really fair in my opinion. My first problem was getting the walls and roof to harden enough to build with. I thought I could finish Operation Gingerbread in one day but I was very wrong. It took THREE days (and several hours in the oven with just the pilot light on) for the gingerbread-cookie walls to harden completely.
Then when they did harden enough to be sturdy, the pieces weren’t perfectly square anymore. I think something happened in the various ovens I transferred them around to. When I put the walls together there were big gaps that had to be filled with copious amounts of gloopy sticky icing. And that icing! Could it be any stickier?!!! It sticks to everything! My clothes, the table I was working on, the floor, my fingers…it was a mess. Of course it didn’t stick when I was using it to glue a heavy star candy to the side of a wall for decoration. No, then it slipped down and left a big track mark of white paste. I guess it wasn’t all that bad. But I would definitely say that this project is best with older kids who can help and not with toddlers who like to not help.
My ten-year-old niece, Rapunzel, was a huge help. I don’t think I could have done it without her.
In the end, the little house turned out pretty cute. I covered up the icing glue tracks with slices of gumdrops. My niece added a curving pathway and candy corn fencing. Then we dusted everything with powdered sugar “snow” and called it a day. Enough sugar will heal all that ails, right? The kids loved it. After I took enough photos to prove that I really did complete the project, we gave the house to my Grandpa to display at the group home he lives in. I think the old folks will appreciate it a lot more than I did.
