When you open the gingerbread house that is already pre-made, you think to yourself, this won’t be too hard. It’s already made; all I need to do is take it out of the box and carefully decorate it with the premade frosting and stale gumdrops. 

Your face drops slightly as you grab it out of the box and put it onto the counter. It’s crooked. The house has a natural tilt to the right. Okay, surely some candy canes and sprinkles can cover up the slant. If the house is decorated perfectly, nobody will even be able to see the crookedness. 

Opening the bag of premade frosting, your doubt begins to settle in even more. The frosting is as hard as a rock. As you cut the tip of the piping bag and squeeze the bag, the frosting slowly, slowly begins to come out. When the frosting goes onto the rim of the house, you can quickly see that this gingerbread house is not going to look like the inspiration picture you had pulled up on your phone from Pinterest. 

Once the frosting is on your house, you look at it, puzzled. How is this frosting even supposed to have the gumdrops and sprinkles stuck onto it? Looking at the box, you realize something you have done wrong. You didn’t look at the instructions. As you pick up the instructions, you see you were supposed to knead the frosting until it was soft and then it would pipe out properly. Okay, so now your house is slanted and doesn’t have the most aesthetically pleasing frosting on it. However, candy canes can fix everything – even this catastrophe of a gingerbread house.  

You dump out all of the candy you got from the gingerbread house kit. There are four cracked candy canes, 15 stale gumdrops, and eight bright red Skittles. This isn’t the candy you expected to save your gingerbread house, but it can’t hurt to try. 

First, you decide to go in with the gumdrops to decorate the roof. It is slowly starting to look better! You can barely even see the tilt! Wait a minute… maybe you spoke too soon. The gumdrops begin to slide down the roof slowly, and then, one by one, they begin to fall off your house. That could be a sign from Santa’s elves that gumdrops were not meant for your gingerbread house. 

Looking at your leftover candy, deep down, you know there is absolutely no saving your house. Well, at least attempting to build your gingerbread house got you into the holiday spirit! Maybe that was all the house was meant for – not to be an aesthetic creation but to prepare you for holiday cheer.