Our Twelfth Night Gingerbread Houses

one of our annual train station gingerbread houses

Vince and I have been making gingerbread houses since long before either of our sons were born ... before we were even married.

The first time we made one was in 1979 in Vince's old house on Cedar Lake in Denville. He was living there with his two graduate school roommates, one of whom was a mechanical engineer. Richie derived all of the "coefficients of gingerbread expansion" on an old school room blackboard in the basement of their house and the two engineers, Richie and Vince, built the best-designed gingerbread house I have ever seen. They practically didn't even need to use any royal icing to hold it together. It fit together like the morter-less pyramids of Egypt!

I was in charge of decorating! Not much has changed.





After we moved into the old Scotch Plains train depot in Fanwood where we raised our sons, we made our gingerbread houses to look just like the original Victorian gingerbread train station ...



 

 ... and nothing like the Georgian colonial the old depot grew up to become when we lived there centuries later. When the boys were little I would always sneak two small wrapped presents into the house as we were assembling it just before we closed it up with royal icing. They were usually little Lego kits or small games or treats. Later on the gifts were bills of an appropriate denomination.

On the Twelfth Night of Christmas on the Feast of the Epiphany, the boys would smash the gingerbread station open with kitchen mallets and rolling pins and find the presents inside. It was the traditional end to our traditional Christmas holiday season. Start packing up the ornaments!

One year I forgot to put presents inside. Coincidentally earlier that summer Vince had "won" a regatta start cannon at a fundraising benefit for the Barnegat Bay Yacht Racing Association down the Jersey shore. So we decided to blow the gingerbread house up in the backyard using silver dragées as cannonballs. The little Remington cannon blew the house to smithereens! We filmed it and played it in slow motion. It looked like footage from the Manhattan Project. We called it "Gingershima":

Making a gingerbread train station was a tradition which my sons insisted we do every year, even after they left for college and jobs in other states ... and long after I stopped stocking the houses with presents. It had become an integral part of our Christmas celebration.












In our kitchen making our train station and helping my niece Aly make her first gingerbread house.

Even when we didn't spend Christmas at home, we would make a "gingerbread" house. We made this one in Vermont where we spent Christmas one year. Instead of gingerbread, to save time for more skiing, we made this log cabin ski chalet out of pretzels and graham crackers.

The year we spent Christmas in Lake Tahoe, we stayed in a ski lodge without a kitchen. We had to resort to buying our "gingerbread" house made of waffles from the bakery at Heidi's Waffle House!

Our Advent Market tour started in Zurich where Vince had an apartment

We didn't need to make or buy one the year we spent the Christmas holidays visiting the Advent Markets in Alsace, Austria, Switzerland and Germany. We were living in one big Alpine gingerbread village!








Last year at Christmastime, we were in the final days of packing and moving to South Africa. The two days it would have taken to bake, assemble and decorate our traditional gingerbread train station were better served in un-assembling our real home. To compensate, I glued together this "gingerbread" train depot using old wine corks!

And although we didn't make a real gingerbread house for our last Christmas in NJ, we soon found ourselves surrounded by them when we got to Vermont for our last Smugglers' Notch New Year's ski holiday. This one was at the nearby Woodstock Inn.





But this year, without our son Nick joining us for Christmas in South Africa and after selling our train station-turned family home in Fanwood last year, I just didn't have the heart to make our sacred gingerbread train station. Besides neither son would be here for the traditional Twelfth Night smashing.

I am hopeful that next Christmas we may all be together again. Maybe in South Africa. If so, I am already thinking about next year's African-themed "gingerbread" rondavel made from rusk walls set up in a circle and topped with a frosted Weetabix thatched roof!

Russian dolls and lacquerware

But since our annual Twelfth Night Gingerbread House Smashing tradition went completely out the window this year, we also did not celebrate the Epiphany with our other usual tradition, our Russian Christmas feast.

Christmas china, silver fox stirrup cups and Ukrainian embroidery

In Russia and other Eastern Orthodox cultures, Christmas is celebrated two weeks after our western Christmas. Being half Slav myself, I always prepared a Russian-inspired menu on Epiphany Sunday for my family and friends. But South Africa is too darn hot this time of year to slave over the stove making hot borscht. No Arctic Vortex here like there is back in the USA!

naturally shed deer antlers and birchwood

The heck with tradition - this year we ate Chinese!