Gingerbread Houses

     I am not the typical Christmas lover. I like it, getting and giving gifts is always the best part. The atmosphere of Christmas just does not feel the same as it used too and I feel like it barely snows anymore here at least. But this year was a little different than the last, the things I did here with my friends made me realize something that never hit me before.

    I was approached by one of my friends a couple of weeks before Christmas break had started. I was asked if I would like to compete in a gingerbread house contest with five of my other friends. I was a little hesitant at first since I do not really like arts and craft type activities and finals week was approaching fast, so the more stressful times of college were right around the corner. I decided to do it and thought it would be fun. Boy was I right, we were split up into three teams of two and it was not a race. Once completed, pictures would be sent to our friend's mom and she would be the judge. To avoid a little thing called bias we did not tell her mom whose gingerbread house was which. My team got off to a hot start, everyone else's houses were collapsing at the base and falling apart. Ours held together beautifully and then the bad news came. My team was composed of my friend Tristen and I, well we are both guys so the whole decorating aspect of this challenge would prove to be a problem for us. We did the best we could but when it comes down to it, we got second due to the fact ours did not compete decorative wise like the others, but our structure was the best, personally I think it was rigged because the winner's walls were on their last life and if a five mile per hour gust of wind came that house would just be rubble

    The moral of this story is I made me really appreciate Christmas again and realize it is really all about spending time with the people you love to be around and who you really care about. This definitely brought back some of the spirit I feel like was lost in the past.