UNDER CONSTRUCTION........paper

Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday! We have been extra busy the past few days, preparing for this special season of giving thanks. One tradition that I wanted to pass on to my kids was actually shared with me from the family of my dear friend, Hope. She has had this tradition for many years, and was generous enough to include me several years ago when I lived by her. Every year, for Thanksgiving, she makes a gingerbread house...something her grandkids always enjoy looking at and eating. She has lots of experience, talent, and even special molds to make fancy house pieces......I don't have those things, but I still wanted to try! My favorite cookbook is "The JOY of Cooking", it has information about almost every food, and recipes for almost anything you can imagine...including gingerbread houses. Honestly, I was a little intimidated to try this, but I knew my kids would enjoy it so much....so I went ahead. First I had to measure and cut out all of the pattern pieces from cardboard, which I then covered in wax paper to keep them sanitary. Then I made the dough and rolled it out.

I had to cut out each shape with a knife, going around the patterns I had made.

The pieces expanded while they were baking, so while they were still hot I trimmed them all up to the correct size again.

I got all of this taken care of on Saturday, then stored all the pieces until we were ready to assemble today. Let me interject here that I was very surprised to find all of the ingredients I needed for this project. Powdered sugar was the only difficult thing to find. I eventually found it in small packages of only about 1 cup each. Which worked perfectly actually, because that's all I needed. I made up a batch of royal icing and started the construction of my house.
I found the plastic plunger you see in the picture at the grocery store for about $1! It came with all the decorating tips and everything. It's really cheaply made, but it worked great for me.

Here we're getting all of the walls up.

Next came the roof.

It can stand alone.....so far, so good.

Honestly, I had a hard time letting the kids decorate this...I was so afraid it would fall down! But I did let go and let them put candy on, and tell me how they wanted it to look.

And here's the completed house! I think it looks pretty good.....especially for our first one! Thank you, Hope, for passing on such a fun tradition. We'll all be thinking of you as we look at our house... and when we're eating it later in the week!

Okay, now about the "paper" part of my title. Construction paper, that is. As I mentioned, we like Thanksgiving. We like to decorate our house for the holiday too. I had only a few decorations that I brought with us, and this is a large house. I wanted the house to look extra festive because of all the guests we'll be having on Thursday. I also wanted a way to be a witness to these people, without getting ourselves in trouble. I may not be able to vocally witness to them, but there's no rules against how I decorate my house. I had a few problems when it came to finding decor....but they were all easily solved. First of all, Israel doesn't celebrate Thanksgiving, obviously, so I can't just buy decorations here. Secondly, I'm too cheap... umm... I mean frugal, to order expensive items online. Third, I was in a time crunch, since I only thought to decorate about a week ago! Then it came to me.....construction paper could solve all of my problems. The way I see it, you have a few precious years when your children are young that you can get away with decorating with construction paper. A few years from now my decorations would look sad and pitiful; but for now it's just cute....because my kids made them.
I was able to witness through God's Word by printing "thankful" Bible verses and making them look festive.

We're happy with it, and my kids think it's great having their artwork displayed and having the house look fun.
This is my lone "real" decoration!

The garlands are what I brought with us, the candles are from my friend Liz, and the book of Thomas Kinkade pictures is from Hope. For the record, I have never been confused with an interior designer! :)

I know this has been a long post, but I have one more funny thing to add, even though it's not related to my title. A few weeks ago we needed some chicken so that I could boil it and shred it (I keep portions of shredded chicken in my freezer so it's handy for soups and casseroles and such). We usually buy chicken that is boneless and skinless, but since this costs more we thought we'd save some money and buy a kind that would require a little more effort on my part. The frozen chicken here doesn't come individually flash frozen in bags, like in the states. Here, it's all stuck together in a big chicken lump, and you can't really tell what you're getting. We knew it was chicken, but we couldn't read the package to see what part it was. We decided to try anyway and see what we got. Today I decided to boil my "chicken lump" and see what I came away with. After it had boiled for a while I went to check on it and noticed that it was all wings! Not only is there not very much meat on this part of the bird, it made me laugh out loud because of my past with chicken. You may remember that I mentioned recently how I have an aversion to raw poultry because of working in a chicken factory several years ago. Guess what my job was at that factory? I worked on the "wing wheel", which dealt only with the wings. Now here I am, 11 years later, facing my pot of wings and laughing about my "wing wheel" that has come full circle.