Of course, I reckoned without the ingenuity of Madison Avenue.
Those of you who have read the last column in this space will be aware that I have so far failed utterly to find any conspiracy theories about Theodore Roosevelt. It isn’t that he is not liable to accusations—no one whose name appears on the Interwebs is—but that he keeps getting confused with Cousin Franklin, and people are busy falling all over themselves to tell us FDR’s secrets. (And how they can use the word “secret” on the Internet without giggling escapes me. It’s like “private.”)
So I filled the rest of the space observing the decline of a once mighty move to get us all to set up valentine’s Day trees once the time for Christmas trees had passed, and St. Patrick’s Day trees after that. The days of shamrock-themed strings of lights would appear to have passed without much regret.
But I was in a large store yesterday and my eyes widened at the sight of a kit for making your very own Valentine’s Day gingerbread house. Of course! I noticed, without making much of it, that there were haunted house gingerbread kits in the stores last Halloween, but now I see what the next push will be. It makes sense, really: decorating a tree is regarded by much of America as a chore, but eating gingerbread….
Mind you, the whole business does deliberately ignore another part of the question. My mother had a metal gingerbread house form. I saw it every year when we pulled out the revered old paper bag with the Christmas cookie cutters in it. But I never, ever saw it used.
See, constructing a gingerbread house requires a certain amount of manual dexterity, to start with, and a modicum of artistic talent as well. Viewed with nostalgia, our Christmas cookies were superb, and better than anything else any of the rest of you EVER decorated at Christmas. Viewed impartially, though, I think they were somewhat short of perfectly edible. We tended to go for the big, gaudy (and, nowadays, regarded as slightly poisonous) candy decorations. The cookies we liked to decorate were cookies that crunched when eaten. With luck that sound was not your teeth cracking on a layer of solid sugar.
I have eaten a number of gingerbread houses, or at least assisted in their demolition, and the temptation to go for big, chunky candies which looked nice but were difficult to eat was apparently irresistible (these bits were often thrown away along with the fossilized chunks of gingerbread which had been welded to the cardboard base by icing sugar. We actually preferred gingerbread houses from those of our friends who gave up, and just piled up walls and roof sections, tossed in a little candy, and said “Here. Do it yourself.” We ate the gingerbread and tossed the candy in a drawer for later.
But never mind that. The point of gingerbread house kits, after all, is not the construction of gingerbread houses, but sales. And the Valentine’s Day houses, like Christmas ones, LOOK so yummy on the box. I might prefer, say, a red velvet set of walls to go with the themes, but gingerbread is always welcome. And my mind immediately leapt to ideas for the future.
Gumdrops come in all colors, after all. Use a bunch of green ones for a St. Patrick’s Day house with shamrocks drawn freehand in the white icing on the roof. (A lot of us are still getting snow in March, so it fits.) And LOOK at this Fourth of July gingerbread house, its roof studded with multi-colored lollipops to simulate fireworks going off overhead. How about a Father’s Day gingerbread house, or maybe a gingerbread garage, with a gingerbread Mustang parked outside with marzipan golf clubs in the back? Once we think outside the house, how about a gingerbread highway construction project for Labor Day, with jelly bean gravel and a big gingerbread truck filled with chocolate asphalt for pouring as pavement or into the palms of each State Engineer?
It has all the benefits of the tree idea with the added advantage of edibility (perhaps) and without the pressure of having to put presents under your St. Patrick’s Day tree. I LIKE the idea. It’s got scope, it’s got legs.
It’s got calories.
Blogsy Babbles 