There’s nothing like having company over to motivate me to organize piles of books, discarded mail that needs shredding, fabric-waiting-for-a-project, and at this time of year, holiday catalogs that I feel as though I must look through at least once for fear of missing that great something. On the first Saturday every December a group of us comes together to sing Christmas carols at a local senior apartment building. The tradition started eleven years ago when one couple became friendly with a resident of a nearby senior apartment building. After this couple moved last year, we offered up our house as home base for pre-presentation choral (!) practice and festive holiday noshing. Their new address thirty miles away hasn’t dampened their enthusiasm for whipping up giant pots of vegetarian chili, chicken noodle soup, chocolate chip cookies, and being in charge of song books. All I had to do was make the house presentable for company. And it was also the perfect excuse to appoint gingerbread housebuilding with top priority on Saturday morning!
In years past I’ve decorated dozens of gingerbread cookies with nothing more than twirly white royal icing:
a forest of fairy tale trees and …
… more kitties than you can shake a stick at …
… for neighbor gifts.
I would love to show you pictures of everyone practicing “Joy to the World” and “Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer” in my dining room, but I don’t have permission to post my friends’ and their children’s faces here, so this photo taken as we finished up our concert will have to do. For the last song we spread out around the room, circling the residents and hopefully serenading them into the holiday season with “We Wish You a Merry Christmas.”
