LETTERS FROM HOME: LOADS OF GINGERBREAD MEN AND COOL WHIP SNOW

Nov. 30, 1995

Dear John, Karin, Christian and Inga

The ritual of Christmas baking has begun. Like most rituals it has begun slowly.

DC made gingerbread men and a gingerbread house. Our own house smelled otherworldly for days, the way you imagine Mrs. Claus' would.

The gingerbread house is a sight: wafer cookies for windows, a gumdrop sidewalk, a sleigh made of licorice, all topped off by a lovely thatch of snow made from Cool Whip and coconut. Turns out, Cool Whip hardens beautifully and won't fall off. It's the perfect dessert topping/adhesive.

The snowman made of instant mashed potatoes didn't fare as well. Maybe sugar is the secret ingredient here.

The gingerbread men, all 280 of them, would have been almost perfect except that the molasses in the gingerbread laid a bit heavy on the tongue. Gingerbread men make good dog biscuits.

Nieces and nephews and my brother's girlfriend's son Dominick were in town for the holiday. We had most of them over for a bunking party with popcorn and sodas and a movie. Stayed up until 1 a.m. watching "Three Ninjas," a film about three all-American teen-age brothers who save a cute girl's Native American environmentalist father from being tortured by bad guys with bad haircuts.

They accomplish this by endlessly beating up the bad guys in pizza parlors and junk yards. Dominick loved it. The girls groaned and played with the puppies. DC fell asleep.

The lesson the boys learned from their wizened Chinese (?!) grandfather was to use their ninja abilities not for their own glory but to help others. The lesson I learned was: If you've seen 15 minutes of one ninja movie you've seen them all.

The kids had such fun helping DC decorate the gingerbread house that I think they forgave us for the bad night at the movies.

Amid all this life, DC's blue and yellow parakeet died. Just dropped dead one morning. It was too beautiful to bury, she said, so the parakeet lay in state in one of the outdoor planters until the puppies discovered it. Then it had a proper burial.

We went to the Christmas parade with DC's parents and our friend Judy. My parents were in the parade, playing "White Christmas" on the back of a flatbed truck loping along somewhere among the marching band, the Harleys, firetrucks festooned with lights and the church groups singing "Silent Night." It was surreal to wave at them like all the other parade-watchers.

Afterward, all of us had dinner together in the same restaurant where we dined together after last year's parade.

Quickly, the parade and post-parade dinner almost have become a tradition, a step away from ascending to a Christmas ritual. All of it as sweet to me as the smell of gingerbread.

Love, Sam

~Sam Blackwell is a staff writer for the Southeast Missourian.