Gingerbread Day in China!

About five years ago, encouraged by the prompting (i.e. goading) of my sister, we launched our first Gingerbread Day event at my church. It was incredibly fun and all involved concurred that it should be an annual event. We would have about 75 children each year and just go crazy with frosting and fun. As I prepared to travel to China to get Abbey (November 2006) my faithful friend took over my vision and kicked it up a notch adding more children into the party. I was so happy to know that even though we would be here in China this year the tradition lived on and they added a petting zoo, pony rides, and a bounce house this year. Those of you that know me well could probably see this coming...
When we packed for China we each brought just two suitcases, that's it. So we really took the bare essentials (basically medicine) but we had to include a can of meringue powder so that we could make a gingerbread house at Christmas. (egg whites in royal icing are not a good idea when we just recently had 90k chickens slaughtered on the border of Shenzhen and HK with bird flu). Well, when we were at Disneyland my fearless leader here in China admired the big gingerbread house we saw at the hotel and I told her about the fun we've had each year with our parties, she thought we could do it here for our school.
Let me tell you it was a new frontier and a new challenge, but we did it! Friday night we had about 200 people in for a big party and the kids really enjoyed it. It was different in that we couldn't have each child build their own house, they worked in groups on prebuilt houses that would then be taken to the orphanages. They did get to decorate and eat their own gingerbread man and I read them the story (new tale for everyone there). We had to order powdered sugar and meringue powder online and have it shipped from another city, but it worked. I just use my online converters to help me with the metric system for recipes. So our gingerbread traditions have now replicated into China and I am so happy for all the children. A shout out to Beth M, an online friend who mailed us the gingerbread cookie cutters, and also to Terri F who sent us the huge containers of sprinkles, they will now be used for the kids at the orphanages.
Funny thing - I was in ToysRUs last week and a woman (of course Chinese) came up to me and showed me a picture of something similar to a gingerbread man and asked me if I knew where she could find something like that, her daughter wanted one. I was just cracking up. I must smell like gingerbread. I think it's a wave of things to come in China.