It Took Eleven Years And It Was Worth The Wait

Eleven years ago, on Christmas in 2009, my aunt gave Number 3 a bunch of Jan Brett books for Christmas.

She gave us The Hat and The Mitten and Gingerbread Friends and a bunch of others.

If you are an elementary school teacher, you probably know Jan Brett really well.

If you are a parent, there’s a good chance you also know of her books.

If you have young kids and you’ve never heard of her, you gotta check her out.

Her illustrations are beautiful.

And one thing all of her books have in common are the hidden clues or substories in the borders of her pages.

On another note, every year I do an “advent calendar” with the kids where we wrap up 24 Christmas/wintery books and open up one a day for the month of December.

They are books we already have, so they’ve read them all before, but they enjoy being surprised by which book we will read that night.

I used to wrap the books myself, but now the kids wrap them.

Two nights ago Number 7’s pick was Gingerbread Friends.

I have been reading this book for at least eleven years.

The secret “story” in the margins of this book is the recipe for gingerbread cookies.

For eleven years I have looked at these ingredients.

Every year I have thought to myself, we should see if the recipe actually works.

FOR ELEVEN YEARS.

And this past Friday I said to Number 6 and 7 who are the only ones who really still participate in the reading of the picture books, Let’s make these this weekend.

And yesterday we finally did.

We had all the ingredients in the house except for molasses, so I picked some up at the grocery store yesterday.

The kids went through the book and gathered all the ingredients.

They are pretty experienced in the kitchen, so I hardly had to help at all.

Everything was going great until we added in the molasses and got the dough totally combined.

Number 7 couldn’t take the smell of the raw dough.

Luckily the current times had us prepared for that.

She wore a mask for the rest of the gingerbread making experience.

I had never made gingerbread cookies from scratch before and I have to admit, the dough did have an…. interesting odor.

We rolled out the dough and cut some shapes.

We didn’t put enough flour on the counter for the first batch, so we had a little trouble getting them off the counter and onto the baking sheet.

But Number 7 came up with a good strategy.

Our first batch (on the left) didn’t come out nearly as good as the second batch (on the right).

They might not have been flawless, but the dough worked perfectly, and the cookies were delicious!

For eleven years I’ve wondered if the recipe really worked, and it did!!!

I bought some decorating pouches from the grocery store when I got the molasses, and once the cookies were all cooled off, we decorated them.

Number 6 used a gingerbread man he made in like first grade as an example.

The kids had a lot of fun with the decorating.

Even the teenagers joined in!

We really did have a good time doing this.

The kids were super proud of their cookies.

They were super cute.

And a new tradition has been born because I really enjoyed this, too!

When we were all done the kids said, MOM! We should make gingerbread houses out of this!

Now… my kids might be older and I might be more patient, but I’m also not stupid.

The only way a gingerbread house is being constructed from scratch in this home is if someone else is on parenting duty.

I’m sticking with the cookies.

But I gotta say, I’m glad I waited eleven years and until the kids were older to do this.

There were no meltdowns and it was not labor intensive on my part.

Instead of feeling exasperated, I got to actually participate with the kids.

So this is your friendly reminder that you don’t have to do ALL THE CHRISTMAS THINGS with your kids when they are little.

You can wait until they are older.

Because it’s still fun — in fact, it might be much MORE fun.

And even more importantly, you also don’t want to kill anyone in the process.

Happy Baking!