Last year after we finished the house, I took it to the media center and the kids oohed and aahed very appreciatively over it. And it occurred to me that next time I could create a gingerbread library. So I did. This time, I buit and decorated the gingerbread house. (Get a Wilton kit. They are dependable and easy to assemble. Plus their gumdrops are the best I've ever tasted.) I bought some little Christmas decorations - Santa, an angel, a gingerbread person, a reindeer - or maybe it was a moose, hard to tell. Then I found little pictures of books in vendor catalogs, laminated them onto construction paper so they could be folded as book covers, and the gingerbread library was ready for its unveiling.
Again the students were impressed. After three days I noticed though that I was continually answering the same three questions. So I posted the following notice:
Gingerbread Library Answers
1.) Yes, it's real - real gingerbread, candy, and icing.
2.) Yes, I made it (from a kit I got at Michael's which I highly recommend).
3.) No, you can't eat it. Well, theoretically you could - if eating something that 600 students and teachers have touched and breathed, sneezed, coughed, and drooled on does not destroy your appetite. Plus, you know those large insects out in the halls - what do you think they do when we're gone? Have you had life science yet? Microbes? Think about it and don't eat the gingerbread house. (See Hansel and Gretel).
A few hardy souls swear that even answer number 3 and the further information that mice have been nibbling on it will not deter them. And for all I know it might have been them and not the weight of several library mice that broke the back corner off pretty evenly. It doesn't bear thinking about.
Merry Christmas to all!
Posts
