A recent holiday activity with some friends really has me thinking about the concept of being beautifully broken, or as I prefer to think of life as “a glamorous mess”.
Really Robyn? Making a gingerbread house gets you all in the feels? Well… not really, but sorta… follow me here.
Above is the picture I took to document our time together. The finished product of our completed houses. (And I like to think they are quite impressive. No Hogwarts Castle, but impressive for the amateur level.)
So with all of that said, the picture doesn’t document the laughs we shared, our smiles while we enjoyed a Christmas movie in the background, the chimney that never made it on to our house or the panic we faced when we almost ran out of red icing. The picture features the finished products and not the mess we made, or the fun we had, getting there.
There was icing all over our hands (and mouths), little candies rolled all around on the floor and gingerbread crumbs everywhere crumbs could fit. We truly made a mess. And we are four adults, can we just imagine the scene with small children? (Cue the eye roll 🙄 from anyone with children who is now visualizing a real mess in comparison to the picture I am describing.)
What the gingerbread building activity reminds me of every year is that beautiful masterpieces come from big, gross, sticky messes. There would have been no feasible way to get to our finished house without icing all over our hands. It LITERALLY could not have happened. My icing covered fingers were critical in getting our house’s foundation sturdy enough to hold all of our glorious decorations.
Life is messy ya’ll.
The holidays—they can be full of expectations and pressure.
Our jobs—full of deadlines, chaos, and personalities not like our own.
Our families and communities—full of individuals trying navigate through this complex world all while coming together.
My reminder this time of year is that messy can in fact be glamorous. We can strut our hot-mess-express selves right on down the runway because we are beautiful!
We all are broken and not perfect. We all fall. We all are just trying to find our fingernails underneath our icing covered, sticky hands so we can paint them pretty colors.
Embrace your mess and the mess of those around you. The mess we create and move through makes us appreciate the finished product even more. We all need our sloppy, dirty and broken moments to grow and get to our Hogwarts Castle.
Our gingerbread house is still sitting on our kitchen counter. At this point it is probably stale, but it is still standing strong. I think I might just let it stay there a little longer this holiday season. I’m proud of it, and the mess that came with it. 😉
Robyn Fuhrman 
It was all fun to do things together and to have memories. Life is to short. Ao why not make a messn and have fun, Gram
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