Let it sud, let it sud, let it sud!

Yes, sud, my friend. Tonight there was a Scandinavian Christmas party here at ISH, complete with a warm meal, paper crowns, a gingerbread house contest, and fake snow--actually soapy suds flying about. I really wish I had brought down my camera--the event was a sight to behold.

There were about ten of us squeezed around the table, all either student teachers or friends, and we were giddy with getting free food and the idea of creating our own gingerbread house. The hosts had given us all the supplies needed: the basic gingerbread house walls, roof, and chimney, all of which we had to use a tube of frosting to stick together. They also supplied us with some candy things to decorate the house with. Naturally, being the creative team we were, we were not satisfied to use those simple, meager supplies. We improvised.

We put the regular house together as directed, except we decided it would be cool if the house had some interior lighting, so...we put one of the small votive candles inside before we closed it up. We had no fear of our house burning down, but we did have some water near by just in case. To make the chimney look more realistic, we added a crumpled napkin stuck halfway in it to pose as smoke. Very clever.

The problem was trying to figure out how we could make our house extra special. How could we give our house that ingenious kick to win that bottle of wine? We Wisconsites just couldn't pass up on some free alcohol. The solution? Rice pudding.

A wonderful bowl of rice pudding happened to be leftover from our dinner, and we marvelled at how snow-like it appeared. Great! We had the perfect trimming to our roof and along the bottom for that natural, wintery look. Add to that some plastic snowflake confetti that was scattered on the table (far from edible) and some candy shaped to spell out "ISH" and we figured we had ourselves a winner. But we still weren't satisfied. What was missing?

I should note that at this point, we could see our house was melting a bit in the middle, where the flame was overheating our poor little house. In fear that the meltdown would lead to a collapse, we temporarily put out the flame. The only problem was figuring out a way to relight it. We'd worry abou that later.

Ah yes, we needed a path to the house. We used some face-down cards that were one of the many cheap little Christmas party favors to form a brick pathway. A few other votive candles lined the pathway, and nicely highlighted our handy work. What else? We used some of the silver cylindrical wrappers from our party favors to make a few small towers to line the path as well. (They looked sort of like small castle turrets)

Speaking of castles--one of our first ideas was to make the house into a castle using those same turret-shaped cylinders, but we had ditched that idea thinking we didn't have enough time. Since I wasn't directly involved in the building, I figured I'd play around with the turrets and make my own little castle. My tablemates were impressed, and thought the castle should be part of our display. And so, a quaint fairy-tale castle stood adjacent to the house, with its own little playing card/brick pathway.

To complete the deal, we found a way to relight our candle without damaging the frame. One person took a skinny long piece of cardboard that was on the table, lit the end in one of the pathway votives, and through the direction of others peering through the little windows, revitalized our interior lighting. A masterpiece.

Could there be any doubt as to the champion of this contest? Oh yes, it was us, and I have since tasted the fruits of our labor--grape in particular ;) hehehe, Once they awarded the winners, they said they would give one more bottle of wine to the first table to destroy their house--just as the house was finishing those words, one of the girls grabbed our bottle of wine and roughly smashed our house right down the center like she was christening a ship. It was priceless. I think they were hestitant to give us another prize, so they gave the wine to another table house house had collapsed earlier in the night. Oh well, not like we really needed it anyway. But it was funny as hell.

The only question is: who are the poor sods that have to clean up after our mess?