Happy Rugbread Day!

I decree that today is Rugbread Day! Happy Rugbread Day!

No, I am not really important enough to create my own holiday - only the California Prune Promotion Board can do that. But I do have an annual tradition wherein I produce a blob of festively decorated gingerbread for the centerpiece of my parent's annual Christmas Eve party.



I'd say gingerbread house, but most of my blobs are only houses in the vaguest sense of the word and some just aren't at all. Like, say, this train that started it all back in 1987.

For a couple of years my Mom made a house and I made a train, but in 1989 I took over gingerbread-blob production entirely.

Now that Mr. & Mrs. Original PotatoHead are retired and do a lot of traveling, the blob's theme is usually wherever they've traveled that year. Usually Mrs. O.P. picks food from that country and the whole project takes on a veneer of useful enterprise, rather than a plot by Mrs. O.P. to keep me from getting eaten by a mountain lion.

This year they went to Norway, so I had my choice of a stave church or a Viking ship. Being a lazy wimp, I choose the ship. I have some experience in gingershipwrighting, as seen to the right.

In 2001, in a fit of patriotism, I made a gingerbread America - the first ship to win the race that gets you the big fancy cup now know as the (duh) America's Cup.

Anyway, to return to the subject of this post. There's alway one day that winds up mostly devoted to the blob, and today will be that day. I have decided I will give this little personal holiday a name, and I choose Rugbread Day.

The gingerbread that I use for this sort of thing has no leavening and I use cheap fat, so you wouldn't really want to eat it. It has spices, but otherwise is about as pleasant as eating the dining room rug on which I will inevitably get crumbs and jimmies. However, I was thinking more of the bread we bought in Iceland on the same trip when Mr. Potatohead and I visited Norway. The package read "Brown Bread" in Icelandic, but it looked like "Rug Bread" to me, and that's exactly what it tasted like. It also somehow lasted forever so that by the time we got to Norway I was eating it for breakfast with geitost, which is no errand for the faint hearted.

So in honor of darkish flat substances that aren't as good to eat as they should be and last for frickin' ever, I decree today to be Rugbread Day in the PotatoHead household!