Christmas With the Calvins Two: Charlie and the Toy Factory

Chapter Five

"Ok Charlie, you're with me. Holly said as she dragged Charlie over to an unoccupied table. I usually work alone because my plans tend to be a little more...elaborate and the others don't like getting involved. This year, I'm happy to have help."

Holly unrolled a small collection of legal-size paper. She struggled to straighten the corners but gestured for Charlie to take a look. Charlie leaned over to see very detailed schematics for what looked like a gingerbread castle.

"Whoa, you weren't kidding that's pretty elaborate. How long does this competition last?" Charlie asked.

"Don't worry, I work fast." She promised. "Here, you can start scooping some icing into a piping bag." Holly pointed Charlie to a bowl full of icing, a white piping bag and a tip for the bag. "I'm going to start on the stained-glass windows."

"The what?" Charlie asked, awkwardly holding his icing bowl and a rubber spatula.

"Stained-glass. I saw this really cool trick on the internet where you bake candies into the cookie, and they melt to look like stained glass. I want to try that but with this." Holly held up a baker's blow torch for her to admire. He'd seen the kitchen elves up at the Pole use them before and knew that they were traditionally used for deserts like crème brulee and Baked Alaska.

"Fire." He nodded with approval. "Very cool."

"Well, I'm glad that we're in agreement." Holly smiled. "Now get to work. The clock is ticking!" Holly snapped her fingers playfully before reaching for a bowl of hard candies.

"You're right, my bad." Charlie started using the rubber spatula to scrape the icing into the piping bag.

Charlie hadn't been keeping track of the time as he worked side by side with Holly. Elaborate had been an accurate description of the gingerbread castle that Holly had planned out. There were gingerbread towers with waffle cone spires, gumdrop hedges and a drawbridge made of pretzel rods. Holly's stained-glass windows had come out perfectly as if they've been forged and fitted from real glass. It had worked out so well that she'd used the same technique to create a blue mote of melted Jolly Ranchers. He'd only realized that they'd been at it for nearly five hours when an alarm chimed somewhere, and Holly announced for everyone to put their piping bags down and step away from the candy.

"Ok, and that's time." She clapped her hands together excitedly.

"Time for you to show off you mean?" Jack called from across the room. He was still sprinkling coconut shaving over his creation apparently not satisfied with the amount of snow already piled nearly everywhere on his table.

"Like I said Jack, this is for fun. So, who wants to go first?" She surveyed the room.

"We'll go first." Kevin, Jack's partner for the evening volunteered immediately. "The sooner we present the sooner Jack Frost here can start cleaning up his snow."

"There may have been a slight discrepancy about how much snow was enough." Jack shrugged. He put down his bowl of coconut at last and waved everyone over. Charlie and the others joined Jack and Kevin at their table.

"So our theme was Baby it's Cold Outside, Jack's idea." Kevin sighed.

"That's why we needed so much snow!" Jack asserted. Charlie supposed he shouldn't have been surprised that Jack and Kevin's gingerbread house was so good, since almost everyone in the room was a professional baker who had five hours to create something, but he was still blown away by it just the same.

Jack and Kevin had created a Gingerbread log cabin. They'd used pretzel rods like logs and stacked them together by affixing them to the outside of the gingerbread house starter pieces Holly had been baking earlier. There was a chimney climbing up one side assembled out of wafer cookies and Pine trees made of peppermint. There was a wood pile near the door made out of tootsie rolls and of course everything was covered in a healthy dose of snow. Charlie wondered to himself if it was cliché to admit that the snow what his favorite part.