Christmas Memories 3 - That's a Gingerbread Village!

Today's Christmas tale is the story of how the phrase "That's a gingerbread village" came to be part of the lexicon in my school.

Every year we had a number of Christmas traditions, many of which I am sure were common to lots of schools, but there was one in particular that I had not heard of happening elsewhere. I think that after reading my post today you will understand why that was.

One of my teachers was a keen baker and I always enjoyed cooking in school with the children, so one year in a particularly jolly staff meeting the idea was hatched to hold a Christmas Bakeoff in school. Please note that we combined the words 'bake' and 'off' to ensure that we would not get into trouble with Paul Hollywood et. al. for stealing their idea!

We decided to keep it simple (as we weren't stupid, at least we thought we weren't) so we decided to stick to one round, which for the purposes of copyright we shall refer to as the show-ender. Further adaptations were agreed, which involved the youngest children making simple Christmas biscuits and more challenging bakes for the older ones.

The first couple of years were really successful and really helped us all get into the Christmas spirit. Parents were invited in and we even had our own 'judges' to give out awards. The children were all allowed to take their bakes home with them, which they appreciated, even if their families did not.

Things were going really well so we started to believe our own hype and try to 'improve' things. By improve I really mean make things harder for ourselves. That is really the heart of todays story in terms of leadership - if something is going well you don't need to tinker with it as that can often make the wheels fall off.

One year, the teacher I mentioned at the start of this post, the one who was a keen baker, was the brains behind the idea for her class to each design and make a gingerbread house for their bakeoff entries. The children loved this of course, and produced some very intricate plans involving different coloured icing and various kinds of candy. They even planned windows to be made by melting boiled sweets, just like in the TV show.

As the day approached it became clear that finishing their houses was going to be a real challenge, and on bakeoff-eve plans were starting to be made for scaling things back. These plans were quickly shot down and when I arrived at school on the big day I was greeted by the site of the teacher, who I am pretty confident had worked through the night and now resembled a member of the cast of Bugsy Malone after the splurge-gun shoot out scene. She was confident though that her efforts meant that the gingerbread village would be built in time, but she hadn't factored in the final part of the builds, the assembly of the houses themselves.

The event was due to start at 1pm that day, and at 12:59 we were putting the final touches on the houses, after several members of staff, myself included, working for most of the morning. I would like to say that they looked amazing, but although a lot of the finishing off had been done by adults it looked like they had been put together by our preschool children.

From that day on, 'a gingerbread house' became shorthand for an idea that had got out of hand and although fun would probably result in at least one nervous breakdown. I will always have that phrase ready in appropriate situations and remember that particular Christmas for mostly fond reasons.