Annie - Your gingerbread house sounds terrific! I bet it was so much fun to make it and eat it too! I am sure your daughters remember all those good memories. And if you ever make them again, maybe for your babies's babies please share a picture... I like to make cookies with friends and then we put them in small bags to share with other friends.:) Teresa - What an interesting life you had! A lot like mine, traveling to different places and now I am here for good, I only take vacations now and for short time, don't like to leave my 3 dogs alone for too long.:) We have parties for friends to practice languages, I do all the cooking for a group under 20 but for a group bigger than that we do a potluck. I always tried to include activities for the parties, sometimes we invite a chef and if it is daytime we always include a tour of the garden, even non-gardeners like that because they get to see how some of the food is grown and I usually include the harvest in the dishes that I make. This year I grew an Italian winter squash that were so big that gave us a lot of meals to share with friends. One of the favorite dishes was the lasagna made with sausage and squash. Silvia

Your house is adorable. One year for Christmas, I made the sides and roofs, one house for each small child, and paired them with a big cousin to decorate. It was one of the best activities over the years. The little ones loved the attention from the big guys. Another tradition we started for the cousins was that you had to hug and thank whoever gave you a gift. We had some crazy hugs, especially among the guys. But again, the little ones loved being picked up and swung around.

I especially love the one with the multiplicatous googly eyes. Is that the stay-wet minion? And also Maci's dada-esque interpretation of snow on the housetop. I kept looking for excuses to play with frosting over the holidays, but with sequestering, and requests for pie, I had no excuses. I don't really like eating it, so needed your kind of helpers, especially in the cleaning department.

I just saw this story On BuzzFeed and loved it, so wanted to post a link for anyone else who’s interested. https://apple.news/AhrVrtFAQTTqhKjza_Gu7hA