After scouring the Fulda Family archives (a.k.a. three shoeboxes full of photos), the head librarian (a.k.a. my mom) uncovered visual documentation of the gingerbread houses I built during two consecutive Christmases in my mid-teens. I know this will be difficult, but can you guess which package below contains the wrapped gingerbread house kit purchased from Target? Please, take your time.

While I’d like to say I wanted to build a gingerbread house out of my love for the culinary arts, I really just wanted to shove sheets of gingerbread dotted with gum drops down my throat, and then suck on the bag of frosting as a chaser. However, as I soon learned, eating a gingerbread house is not as fun as Hansel and Gretel made it out to be.

First off, building the house is a lot of work. The roof would slide off, gum drops never quite stayed attached, and overall the house looked like it’d been built by a corrupt contractor who was embezzling supplies for the Lollipop Guild. This was because I couldn’t help [...]

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I bought a gingerbread house kit as a kid for all the wrong reasons. Maybe there aren’t any “right” reasons to build gingerbread houses, unless you’re part of Habitat for Humanity for homeless gingerbread men and gingerbread women, but I wanted to build one because they look so tasty and delicious. I had visions of snacking happily on iced roofs and gumdrop bushes, but one thing Hansel and Gretel never told us: gingerbread houses are hard to eat.

I bought my kit at Target back when I was in middle school. It came with prefabricated walls, a bag of frosting, and some gumdrops and peppermints for decorations. And some of those items actually did end up decorating my house, though many of them were embezzled by the contractor and ended up directly in her stomach. I was a pretty inept contractor too. Getting the roof to stay put without sliding off was a war against gravity that I did not entirely win. There are no gingerbread home inspectors, but mine surely would not have passed the [...]

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