With having Robin here, I really wanted to do some of the things that shout Christmas to me.  Creating a Gingerbread village was one of them.  I had wanted to go to the Ferry Terminal to the Gingerbread display but was a week too late. However our own village was very doable.  In the past, I've done a bunch of different things from using graham crackers to premade kits to baking our own.  The baking-our-own has had varying degree of success.  Then I found a recipe that works smoothly and hints to go with it.  This year, I used the wrong recipe - darn.  Yet we still were able to make it work.  One of the things I still did was to cut the pieces before cooking them and then using the templates cut them one more time immediately after cooking them.  That is the key to fitting it together.  We mixed the icing, had the candy out and started working piecing our houses together.  Lona is definitely the master at piping the icing to make it look like icicles.  Job went rogue like normal and built a castle. He baked his a little darker and pretty much slapped it together.  Robin has his first go at frosting and building in his life.  The first house was condemned after the roof collapsed from frosting weight and we conscripted other house materials to create the villa he built. Once the frosting hardened the candy went on and we added meringue trees and cookie snowmen for villagers.  My plan for next year is to make the nativity scene from gingerbread, snowmen and meringue trees.  I think powdered sugar floated in the air for a good week after this.