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“Stiles, hold still!”
“I can’t, Lydia, it’s falling! How is this supposed to stay here?”
“It would stay if you would hold it in place long enough for it to dry!”
“I’ve been holding it for forever!”
“Oh my god, just take it off.”
Stiles grumbles as he lifts the roof of their gingerbread house off the shoddily-assembled walls, wiping off the royal icing with his thumb and popping it in his mouth. The roof goes back on the kitchen counter, next to the other slab of gingerbread that has not yet been put on the top of their little house.
“This is impossible,” Stiles announces, shaking his head in defeat. “It should not be this hard to put together a gingerbread house. You’re, like, practically a rocket scientist and we can’t get this,” he says to Lydia. “How are little kids supposed to be able to do this?”
“Calm down,” Lydia says, rolling her eyes at her fiance. She loves him dearly, but sometimes he can be a tad dramatic. “We’re going to get it.”
“We’re going to need degrees in gingerbread architecture first,” he mutters. Lydia can’t help but laugh at that.
“Stiles,” she giggles, wiping stray frosting off his cheek. He makes a face at her, but when she rolls her eyes, he ducks in to kiss her cheek anyways.
“We can do this,” she says, determined. She has a graduate degree and is halfway through her PhD program. She can put together a gingerbread house they bought for twenty dollars easily.
“Are you sure?” Stiles asks. In the other room, Finn starts barking, like he too doesn’t believe Lydia’s determination.
It takes another forty minutes, way too much royal icing, and many choice curse words from Stiles, but they finally get the gingerbread house fully put together. The walls are still a little lopsided, and Lydia’s sure the blueprint looks more like a parallelogram than a true rectangle, but the roof stays on when they let go of it, so she counts that as a victory.
“I’m almost scared to decorate it,” Stiles admits, staring at their handiwork. “I feel like if we touch it it’s gonna fall apart.”
“Have some faith in my construction skills,” Lydia says, hitting his chest lightly. “Royal icing is like glue. As long as it’s dry, this house could survive a hurricane.”
“I seriously doubt that,” Stiles says, but he tears open one of the little baggies of candy anyways, pouring the contents out on the table. “You should do the piping on the roof, We both know if I do it it’ll look like a cookie mass murder.” Lydia just laughs at that, taking the piping bag he’s offering her and starting on the scallops on the roof.
“It’s not that hard,” she tells him, following the printed pattern in the gingerbread. “You just follow the lines.”
“Don’t say that, because you know I would find a way to mess it up,” Stiles insists. “Remember how I screwed up the snow last year?”
Lydia thinks back to their gingerbread last Christmas, memories of clumps of powdered sugar covering their entire little house, like it had just survived one of the Nor’easters she’d braved while she lived in Boston. “In your defense, I should have mentioned you were supposed to put the sugar in a sieve, not just pour it on the house.”
“It’s okay, babe,” he says, grimacing. “You don’t have to defend me. You just take care of the piping.”
They fall into a routine quickly— Lydia pipes all the scallops on the roof, and Stiles sticks candies on the overlapping lines while singing along to the Christmas music he’s playing on Spotify. Lydia’s so invested in getting the swags of frosting perfect that it takes her a minute to realize he’s alternating between orange and blue candies.
“Are you really making our gingerbread house Mets themed?” she asks, although she can’t say she’s surprised. Stiles grins at her widely, a hint of embarrassment in his eyes.
“Come on,” he pleads. “Orange and blue is a perfect combination.”
“You and your sucky baseball teams,” Lydia says, shaking her head. Stiles lets that one go with no comment— at least he can admit that his team is not very good.
“Alright,” Stiles says as they finish off the roof. “I’ll put the candy wreath on the front door. You wanna pipe the icicles?”
“Deal,” Lydia agrees, watching him tear open another bag of candies. She readjusts the piping bag in her hand, focusing on piping perfect frosting icicles onto the edge of the roof.
The thing about piping icicles is that it’s time consuming, so by the time she finishes, Stiles is long done with the wreath. Instead, he’s rolling out some of the colored tootsie rolls that came in the box, cutting up a white one intently with a knife.
“Uh, what are you doing?” Lydia asks, trying to figure out what he’s making.
“I made a reindeer!” Stiles says, holding up a bunch of tootsie rolls that have been stuck together triumphantly. “I just have to put his antlers on. Hold on.” Lydia watches as Stiles finishes with the knife, holding up a shape that somewhat resembles the antlers of a reindeer and sticking them on his creation’s head.
Lydia is impressed, for the record, about the resemblance it holds to an actual reindeer. She can clearly see its head, with a round red sprinkle attached for his nose, little ears poking up, and its distinct legs. For something made out of tootsie rolls, it’s pretty impressive.
“Huh,” Stiles says, studying his candy creature. “It sort of looks more like a moose than a reindeer.”
“I love it,” Lydia insists, taking it from him gently and placing it next to the side of the house. “Rudolph the red-nosed moose-deer.”
Stiles laughs at that, his eyes shining as they meet hers, and she can’t resist rising up on tiptoe to press a quick kiss to his lips. “What else do we need for the house?” she asks, and Stiles grins.
Forty minutes later, they have a front walkway lined with Hershey kisses (but the gross ones from the assortment bag they’d bought; the good ones are still in a mug on the coffee table for them to snack on while watching TV), a Santa in a lawn chair, a palm tree, and a blue Jeep, all molded out of different combinations of colored tootsie rolls. “It’s like our house can’t decide if it’s in Hawaii or Vermont,” Stiles says, studying their creation.
“Maybe it’s both,” Lydia says, smiling. “It’s a gingerbread house. It doesn’t have to make sense.”
Stiles gasps at that, regarding her with wide eyes. “Something not make sense? And you’re okay with that?” He shakes his head. “Who are you, and what have you done with my fiancee?”
“Oh, hush,” Lydia says, fixing the leaves of their tootsie roll palm tree. “I think it looks pretty good. What about you?”
“Mmm. It does look great. I think it’s missing something, though.” Lydia’s brow furrows as she watches him unroll another tootsie roll, squishing it flat and cutting it into a little rectangle with the knife. He grabs the frosting bag, and his piping isn’t as neat as Lydia’s is, but she can still see the numbers he writes there clearly: 311, their apartment number.
“Okay,” Stiles says, putting a dot of royal icing on the back and gently pressing the plaque to the exposed gingerbread next to the door, right above the sugar flower planters. “Now it’s finished.”
“It still needs the snow,” Lydia says, and Stiles makes a face when she reaches for the bag of powdered sugar. “Grab the sieve for me?”
“Careful, only get it on the Vermont half of the house,” Stiles says after he hands over the sieve.
“I know,” Lydia says, nodding. Carefully she pours a little powdered sugar into the sieve, tapping it gently so it falls in a light coating over the wintery side of the house. The tropical Hawaii side, with its palm trees and lounging Santa, remains snow-free.
“There,” she says, putting the sugar down on the kitchen counter. “Perfect.”
Stiles smiles at her, slinging an arm around her shoulder, and she leans into his touch, reveling in the way her head fits against his shoulder. Like puzzle pieces clicking together, she always thinks. It never fails to amaze her how complete her life feels with Stiles in it.
“Good work, team,” Stiles says, holding his hand up for a high five, and she grins, slapping his palm with her own.
“We truly are expert gingerbread house builders and decorators,” Lydia tells him, to which Stiles grins.
“Honestly, I’m considering a career change. This is clearly my calling.”
Lydia makes a face at him, patting his chest sympathetically. “I think you might want to perfect your snow dusting skills before you quit your day job.”
“Low blow,” Stiles says, shaking his head like she’s deeply wounded him. “Harsh but true.” He shrugs, then pulls her in closer, dropping a kiss on the top of her head. “I guess we’ll just have to stick to decorating as a team.”
Held against his chest, Lydia smiles.
“I guess so.”