I work from home.
I’ll never complain because there are more advantages to that arrangement than
I can even count, but there is one down-side: I don’t get out much. So on
those occasions where I do leave the house to visit people or get away for the
weekend or pick up a loaf of bread, it opens the door for Of course, no one
gets out much these days, but that doesn’t stop me from seeking out
I recently joined Toastmasters, and this was the speech I gave last week.
My family is very competitive. We love board games, card games, yard games, you name it. From summer nights in my youth playing hours of Michigan Rummy to vacations as adults featuring lip sync battles and cook-offs, this is just what we do as a family. It's always good-natured -- we never take it too far -- but we do go all-out to win. Today, I'd like to show you what I mean when I say my family goes all out.
This was what my parents put together during our last family gingerbread house competition. They love lighthouses, and as someone with an engineering background, my father couldn’t help but run electrical though it. That’s right: this is a fully functioning gingerbread lighthouse. For her part, my mother brought a glue gun. I have to say that bringing a glue gun to a gingerbread house contest is like bringing a machine gun to a knife fight.
We ultimately disqualified my parents’ entry on account that not enough of it was edible. No, that year my sister won with this entry:
My sister is the most artistically skilled of the siblings and the most sentimental. So naturally we greeted this entry with a chorus of boos. I mean, look at it: it’s text book emotional manipulation. But it did win, and rightfully so.
Neither of these houses were surprises. My father is an engineer, my sister is sentimental. You are what you build.
We obviously weren’t able to get together for Thanksgiving this year, but a local non-profit held a gingerbread house contest as a fundraiser, and my teenage daughters and I submitted an entry. While I was picking up supplies for Thanksgiving, I picked up a pair of additional gingerbread house kits for my girls. Not for any kind of contest, just to do whatever they want during the Thanksgiving break. They really took that "whatever they want" to heart…
My older daughter, age 16, immediately announced her intention to build a gingerbread “house of ill repute.” She did not use the term “house of ill repute,” of course. But that’s my angel: she is smart and witty and charming and has a mouth that would make a sailor blush. I’m still trying to decide whether or not letter her build this makes me the Best Dad Ever or a terrible, terrible parent.
My younger daughter, age 14, would never use such language under any circumstances. She’s soft-spoken and still has her little girl voice, which makes it surreal that she’s the one who has become a full fledge horror hound. There’s nothing quite like having conversations with her that include lines like “It’s was fine, Daddy. The movie only had a little bit of cannibalism in it.” She announced her intention to build a “murderhouse” – a gingerbread cabin in the woods, complete with dismembered gingerbread people and gummy worm entrails. And she insisted that one of the gingerbread men be hung from a hook as a homage to The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.
So want to see their houses?
Yeah, so they confessed to talking up a big game, but when it came down to actually putting the house together, they opted to make cute and festive gingerbread houses. Sure, I was a little disappointed, but I wasn’t surprised. They’re teenagers and rascals, their core they sweet kids. You are what you build.
Oh, I never showed you what we entered into the contest:
As you can see here, Godzilla is ripping apart a Japanese pagoda at the base of Mt. Fuji and the Air Force has been sent in to fend him off. We included some sparkler candles to highlight the destruction, but they didn’t come out in the photo as well as we hoped.
I've shown this to friends and family, and absolutely none of them were surprised because of course I made a Godzilla-themed gingerbread house. I am a child. I am a 46-year-old child and with a strange, lifelong Godzilla fascination. So if I'm given the chance to make something creative, I’m gonna get all kinds of weird because you are what you build.
You might think "Godzilla destroying a gingerbread house" was the highlight of my Thanksgiving, but it wasn't. It was making this with my daughters. Because we built more than just gingerbread houses over the holiday. We built memories. We build relationships. And I hope I built an example of what a family can be for when my daughters build families of their own.
You are what you build.
