I would take ice cream cones and tip them upside down and paint them green

and put all kinds of like M&Ms or decorations to make it look like there's a Christmas tree.

I'm talking to my mom about something that was one of my favorite Christmas traditions when I was growing up.

And I also had a cookie cutter that we could cut out rain dears.

So I had rain dears, and then I put a guava frost in and have the reindeer stand up.

It really looked like a Santa's village.

Every year, around the beginning of December, she would come home from the grocery store with a bag full of goodies, boxes of nilla wafers, those individually wrapped caramel

squares, gum drops, and those candies shaped like little spearmint leaves, candy sprinkles and

marshmallows and M&Ms and confectioner sugar, and vanilla cake frosting.

She'd get to work making a special dough from scratch.

She got the recipe from a magazine.

And then the kitchen windows would steam up,

and the whole place would smell like molasses and ginger and cloves and cinnamon.

And after everything had cooled and set,

she'd used the cake frosting to hold the pieces together as she assembled them into a gingerbread house.

And then, my four siblings and I would decorate it with all of those items from the goody bag.

Caramels would turn into a chimney, nilla wafers would become roof tiles,

spearmint leaves as front shrubs, gumdrops and M&Ms for

various kinds of decorative trim, and dusted with a coat of confectioner sugar. The deal was,

on Christmas morning, we were allowed to eat the gingerbread house. But until then, it was look,

but don't touch. You remember Hansel and Gretel, don't you? I mean, if you wanted to create

something specifically designed to tempt a child beyond all hope of self-control, you would create

...