Fame is Fleeting

I was just realizing that I didn't ever write about the fate of our prize-winning gingerbread house. Well, I mentioned it briefly on facebook, but didn't show pics.

Lindsey and I went to retrieve our house at the Uintah Heritage Museum (where they'd held the gingerbread house contest) one week after the competition. The museum smelled wonderful after displaying twenty or thirty gingerbread houses for a week, by the way. But when we got there the lady at the museum was very apologetic because our house looked like this:

The candies and frosting had slid off of one side of the roof when the museum staff moved the table the house was sitting on. I think the lady we talked to was afraid we'd be upset, but...whatever.

We thought we'd take the house back home and replace the fallen candies, but when Lindsey and I tried to lift it up, more candy fell off, and the wing separated from the rest of the house. We were OK with that, and when we said we'd just throw it away the museum lady (I should have learned her name!) said she would just take care of it for us.

If you look closely you can see the two roofs (rooves?) coming away from each other. Also the little roof over the front porch fell off.

I thought maybe we'd just take the tower home for a Christmas decoration, but when I touched it the two halves slid apart, the candy slid off of it, and the roof fell off. At this point we decided to collect the foil-wrapped candies from around the house, and the lights, and call it good.

The back wall fell off first. You can see it, intact, in the trash can below my arm as I dismantle the lights.

The funny thing is that the cookies didn't break and the frosting was hardened, but the house just slipped apart at the seams. We have never, in seventeen years of building these houses, had this happen. Usually they last for-ever! When my kids quit wanting to eat them, but before we started giving them away, we once had a house that lasted until late in February. Then I had to smash it in with a hammer before I could throw it away. Not this year's house!

And now you can see straight through the whole thing. No tower; no back walls. Just a condemned home, surrounded by a pile of rubble.

And that was the end of the 2020 gingerbread house.
Fame really is fleeting!