Gingerbread House?

Every year, we put a gingerbread house together and decorate it as a family at Christmastime. Does it still count as Christmastime on the 29th? It's still the holiday season, because New Year's Eve hasn't passed yet, so I count it.

Of course, in all the years we've been doing this, we've never had a gingerbread house quite like this.

My wife usually gets a gingerbread house kit these days. It's much easier to do it that way. It comes with the gingerbread pieces already cut out, as well as several bags of (not particularly tasty) candy that you can use to decorate it with. She usually supplements that candy supply with a few purchases of her own

So, we used the frosting that came with the kit, and glued the house together. 

Then the kids started adding their artistic candy displays to the exterior.

But soon, we ran into an issue. The frosting just wasn't working to keep the house together. We pulled off the candy that had already been stuck on there, and applied more and more frosting to shore up the sagging walls and roof, but it was to no avail. The thing just would hold together. It was like we were using Elmer's Glue when we thought we were using Super Glue.

Eventually, we had to give up and let it collapse on itself. So, behold, here is our gingerbread house for 2016:

The kids didn't really mind. It just meant that they got to scarf all the candy sooner than usual. They didn't have to give the gingerbread house a week on display, since nobody wanted to look at what had become of it.