It's Christmas Eve in Washington!

First off, if you're not from northern Virginia and have the Christmas station turned on all the time, here's some background music for you. This song doesn't exist outside of the DC area. Everyone hates this song. Everyone, except my family. I think we just love it because it's so terrible. We're special.

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I had all these amazing plans to make an epic gingerbread house this year. I had the mold my mom got me for Christmas last year, I had all the ingredients for dough, I had candy to decorate, I was ready to go!

Yeah, you can guess what happened. Disaster. I mixed the wet ingredients, I mixed the dry ingredients, I combined. Sort of. It had the consistency of ...flour. Something went terribly wrong, and there wasn't even close to enough liquid. It was weird. So I added some stuff (at least 2 cups of extra liquid total, it was REALLY dry!) but it just wasn't working out, and everything ended up in the trash after several hours of frustration. Shoot.

Just when I had given my plans of gingerbread grandeur for the year, my sister comes back from Ikea with the coolest present ever; an Ikea gingerbread house, all baked and ready to put together and decorate, complete with Ikea-style directions. It was awesome.

So, I didn't really bake anything. I mixed my own royal icing at least! Which isn't rocket science, they're are a million recipes online. The trick is you have to use an icing recipe with egg white in it, that makes it get rock-hard, and hold your house together. No canned icing, no cream cheese icing, no powdered sugar icing. Don't even think about it.