Tifftown: Gingerbread Part 1 - Scott Gives a History

The below memory comes from my brother, entirely. His sense of humor and ability to remember our childhood is awesome. Thanks for the laughs, Scott. In future posts I'll continue with gingerbread sagas leading up to modern day.

Ok Kevin… Here is how I remember it. Pictures are not ours to protect the innocent. Tiff, you may want to or maybe not, share this with my nieces and nephew.

As time would do to most entertaining childhood memories, they may be a little embellished but I know that Tiff and I had a good laugh before about it so most must be true.

Intro -

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times… uh… ummm… wrong story. The story begins up on Sand Road in New Milford, Connecticut. Up in the frozen North East where my sister and I served hard time for crimes we didn’t commit. Our only crime was being born into the Kinney family line where everything was about saving a buck and do it yourself if you couldn’t find someone to do it for free for you. We had a house that was full of irony wrapped in indifference cradled in the expression “… if you think it is cold in here, go outside for 15 minutes and tell me how cold it is in here”. On with the story.

The situation -

I remember it well like it was yesterday, the winter of 1978 where the North East was plunged into a blizzard of giant proportions which left us socked in under four plus feet of snow. It was my job to shovel our horrible driveway for free, because that was my contribution to living in the house don’t you know. What made it worse was two things. First, I had a snow shoveling business and everyone else on my route paid me $20 to shovel their PAVED driveways which were shorter. Second, our driveway only had an apron and the rest was sharp gravel and potholes leading up to the two car garage where where the Task Master and the Empress parked their chariots; a 1966 Ford Mustang known as “The Rat Trap” by our mom and the 1978 AMC Concord which my Dad drove like his own police cruiser. Yes, shoveling that driveway was done for free. (post scene comment… You’re Welcome my parents). If you do the math that would make me 9 years old and my sister 10. To say the least, when it snowed or if there was a lawn to be mowed, I was making some good coin. Tiff would make some cash if there was babysitting to be done or her paper route. This is just the back drop to the story. Kevin asked… read on if you DARE!!!!

It was Christmas time and everything my parents bought came from catalogs unless our Mom drove to Danbury to go to the only mall for hundreds of miles and this is not how we did things under house rules. Like any kids, yes, any kids, Tiff and I would start to squeal as we looked at the catalogs from Sears, JC Penny, Service Merchandise, L.L. Bean, Montgomery Wards, Hickory Farms, etc and start our request for everything. Quite honestly I wanted a gun from Sears but there was no way I would be aloud to get one (yes, it fits the “A Christmas Story” tale where my mom just knew I would shoot someone’s eye out); I got a slingshot instead.. right good compromise, we now know what road that put me down. That and being picked last for kickball, that is what made me so bitter. What, I digress you say, well, on with the story. Here is where it gets good. Tiff spied this awesome Gingerbread house in one of the catalogs which was pre-made, only some crazy amount of money was needed. Tiff and I needled our parents whining, bickering, and begging for this gingerbread house and how our parents needed to buy this as it would be so “Christmas”. Of course we would most likely devour it as soon as it showed up in the mail and so there would be no display time for it but that is reasoning any consenting adult would have come up with. Oh yes, it was exciting to look at it would be like the Taj Mahal of all Gingerbread houses...

We were kids we did not really think about where we would put such a monstrosity but we knew we wanted it in a greedy way. Since our parents were reasonable adults that have shown good decision making in the past -

(All these topics are stories for another day)

1- Burning all the cardboard boxes in our fireplace because they were too cheap to pay for the trash removal when we moved. This caused a chimney fire that to this day I am sure the neighborhood still talks about the fabled Atlas Rocket we had for a chimney with flames jetting out of it to where THEY almost burnt down the house (not us kids)

2- Deciding it would be a good idea to go on the SIP in New York when I had stomach flu.. you know where that one went. There are no public bathrooms in NY, NY.

3 - My mom telling me that she would be OK with picking me up from school… until I went to an out of district school, and she forgot to pick me up

4- My Dad telling me never to call him at work unless the house was on fire. Nope, it wasn’t on fire, it was an early spring and the river in our back yard flooded our house. No calls were made

… our parents decided it would be a good idea to order a mail order “Make your Own Gingerbread house” kit since they were not going to front the money and so we needed to give them ours (ok, yea, yea, fair is fair. That showed good decision making THIS TIME as far as the money was concerned). My sister spotted the perfect gingerbread house to build…

It looked doable. Did I mention my sister was not good in the kitchen. ROFL… she is MUCH better now at cooking. I have to say, compared to her cooking as a child (which barely rifled my Mom’s cooking.. yuck) my sister is the Julia Child, Giada de Laurentiis, the Alice Waters of Chico, CA. I love my sister, she is cool no matter what I write next :) Sadly, our parents never took this into account that a 9 and 10 year old would be doing this complex gingerbread house and the one leading the pack, my sister, really was not good at cooking; ironically I was, the 9 year old. I was the one who made cookies, pastries and made dinners when our mom went back off to college and our Dad woke at his job in Danbury. Yes, this part of the story is where tears of irony and laughter come in.

My sisters eyes lit up when she got the package in the mail…

My stomach lit up when I saw it come in the mail… boy, I love Gingerbread, cake, icing, yummy….

So there we were with this box in the kitchen and our parents in the TV room with the fireplace roaring both smoking cigarettes. there was no heat on anywhere else in the house as that is how we saved money; Fireplaces and stove cooking like it was the 1800’s. Both of us want this gingerbread house to happen like right now. What a cool project. Anyhow, I had lost interest as it was not a gun and this was my sisters project. My sister began to pull things out of the cupboards and starting to mix and match things in the kitchen. Oh yes, the gingerbread house came with icing mix, assorted gum drops, candy canes, peppermints, you name it, it was quite the house, it had potential. Sadly this is where the gingerbread house turns into the ghetto house. The instructions I am sure must have said little things like let it cool, grease the cookie sheet so it will not stick or use parchment paper (like our parents would keep that around the house) do not make the icing too runny, not too much banking powder as we do not want the gingerbread walls to turn into cake walls. Even though our house was only a few years old, our oven was junk. It would never heat to the right temperature with the old dials that vaguely told you that you were somewhere around 350*. Well, the first batch of gingerbread walls came out… really soft like yummy cookies but stuck to the cookie sheet. Since we only had one cookie sheet, it was important to pry off the gingerbread, and not break it, and get the next batch on that sheet. This gingerbread house was a quick build.. we would have this thing up by night fall. As the hour turn into a few hours the gingerbread project was not looking any better. The next batch came out burnt, the subsequent one came out alright but could be better. Tiff was getting into the cooking “zone” by the time all the gingerbread walls were made. We held up the box and looked at the picture, our eyes cast back to the kitchen

Things were not looking so good but we would soldier on, we were finding this very funny actually. It looked horrible. As we cooked there was time to sit and gaze at the candy that was shipped with the house, and sample some of it too. Tiff tried to cut the walls of the house and make them stand up… it didn’t look so bad if you didn’t look at the burn marks. My sister was trying this project for the very first time.

Every once in a while our parents would shout out from their recliners about they smell something burning; not like they got up to check. So, as the story goes, my sister was about to have a meltdown in the kitchen ….