One of our traditions is to build gingerbread houses with Spencer and Templar sometime between Thanksgiving and Christmas. We started doing this probably ten or eleven years ago, while Spencer and Templar were attending graduate school and before Hill or Danaan were born.

The first year we each built our own construction. I constructed the John Hancock Building. Whirl built a jail scene from rural Louisiana. Spencer succeeded at a traditional gingerbread house, and Templar added a giant “atomic duck” to Spence’s backyard. The next year we decided on a combined project: a big gingerbread castle. Spencer was in charge of all the Disneyesque fantasy themes while Whirl, Templar and I subverted it with candy-on-candy warfare. We deployed a gummi bear army to defend Gingerbread Castle and rallied a huge band of marauding barbarian marshmallow men to assault it. The castle grounds were covered in candy-gore. We cut gummi bears in half and dripped red food coloring over the icing for blood. We constructed small siege engines and then smashed them. It was deliciously gorey. This set the tone for the project from then on. A somewhat coordinated effort using the combined creativity of the group, limited by the construction properties of gingerbread and the availability of particular cookie cutters.

The third year we built a zoo — but not your ordinary zoo this one came complete with a Jurassic Park-styled velociraptor pen. Of course in our version of the zoo the velociraptors escaped and began eating the hapless gummi bear zookeepers. We had giant gummi worms, and gnostic bears worshiping a mysterious coyote-god. In 1999, we included our friends Viv and Rio in on the fun and built a Star Wars: Phantom Menace inspired gingerbread pod race. (Templar built a Sarlacc Pit to go with it.)

For several years the gingerbread tradition languished when Spencer, Templar and Hill moved to Philadelphia. We got together for Thanksgiving in 2004 in Philadelphia and reprized the tradition in an abbreviated form, building a Gingerbread Race Track for Hill and his Hot Wheels.

This year we got back into the full swing of things and built the Gingerbread Field Museum. While we considered adding some horrorshow elements to the construction, we generally kept things on an even keel, and did our best to try and represent the museum in gingerbread. We included elements of well-known exhibits like Sue, the lions of Tsavo, the hall of gems and Bushman the Gorilla. Whirl meticulously fashioned a pair of peregrine falcons out of jelly beans and installed them on frieze above the south entrance.

We are not particularly reverent with our portrayals. Spencer has pictures from several of the years projects, but most of them were shot on film. We talked about scanning them in sometime and including them online. If she can find them.

This year’s was big. It took the six of us — four adults and two children — about six hours to complete. It measures a little more than three feet wide by two feet deep by about a foot high. Both Spencer and I took pictures before, during and after the construction.

It will remain at the Perry’s house and serve as decoration, snack and dessert for the next couple weeks. The candy usually goes first, and then the gingerbread. Sacrifices to the spirit of Christmas sugar.

I’m trying to remember my first encounter with photography in any form other than being the subject of my parents’ all-seeing eyes. My dad enjoyed taking pictures of me as I grew up. He would shoot both slide and print film. Not unlike the experiences of many people, my childhood included a number of moments captured on film for all eternity. Some are sweet: my sister and me standing among the aspen as the leaves turned color in the fall. Some are embarrassing: naked, two years old and pudgy, collapsing a plastic swimming pool. Many are memorable in that classic sense, quiet captures of being in a certain place at a certain time. In all of this I was aware of the camera only as I was the subject.

I think the moment of realization that a mechanism to photography existed came later. The understanding that my dad had learned this method came to me when as a young boy as I looked at a picture he had taken at night in Washington D.C. I cannot recall the exact subject of the photograph– I suspect the primary subject was one of the monuments or famous buildings from the capital. I want to say it was a wide shot along side the mall with the Washington Monument off to one side. But what I remember clearly was that it contained a streetscape. Bright streaks raced along the pavement where the cars should have been. But there were no cars. There were only these streaks of light. I asked dad about the picture. He told me how he took it. I thought he was a magician. He took a picture and made all the cars disappear. Obviously the cars had gotten zapped by these streaks and now were gone!

Dad patiently explained to me how he composed the shot. He had taken a long, multi-second exposure and what I was seeing was the glow of tail lights as the cars moved through the frame. The entire lesson went right over my head at the time. What stuck with me was this idea that a photograph was an object in its own right. Up until that point I had thought that photographs were just ways to record what something else looked like: a secondary thing of no real importance. But the taillights proved otherwise. I knew the cars had been driving by when dad took the picture. But they were not in the picture. They disappeared. I knew taillights were not a hundred yards long, but they were in the picture. They went all the way down the mall to the monument.

I wanted to learn how to do this. I wanted to know how it worked. And with childish intensity I continued to pester my dad until he relented and began to reveal the secrets to me.

Dad’s 35mm Nikkormat FT was one of the first real cameras I ever used. Dad had bought it when he was in college. He took it with him everywhere. Backpacking in Colorado, canoe trips in Indiana, bicycle trips around Lake Michigan. Dad used this camera to capture the Colorado River at the bottom of the Grand Canyon and the top of Long’s Peak in Rocky Mountain National Park. He hauled it up to the top of Mt. Elbert and through the backwoods of the Minnesota Boundary Waters Wilderness Area. When I was fourteen, Dad gave me this camera. Although in all honesty I suspect it was a loan that I never paid back.

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