Christmas Nativity Scenes + Gingerbread Houses (No Advertising Thread)

Dear users, dear authors,
do you like Christmas nativity scenes and gingerbread houses, or not so much?

Yes and no.

Nativity scenes:
I have to admit, I’m not particularly religious and don’t really need a nativity scene.
When my great-grandfather was still alive during my childhood, though, he always set up a homemade nativity scene that was about 2x2 meters in size. It was amazing! I loved that nativity scene.

Gingerbread houses:
I thought I liked them.
Now my future in-laws have given us one as a gift… Handmade! Personalized, with names, sugar cats,… and all the sweets we love.
Now I hate gingerbread houses. I spend about 30 minutes every day standing in front of the gingerbread house, wavering between “keep it intact” and “oh, I could sneak a little piece...” Too beautiful to eat, too good not to eat ;)

We always had a nativity scene at home that my father had made out of papier-mâché during the war. Unfortunately, it broke over the years. When my son was born 39 years ago, I made a few nativity figures out of self-drying modeling clay, and two years later, when my daughter was born, I made the stable. Over the years, more and more pieces have been added, and every year I look forward to setting them up again and adding a new little something. Last year it was a fountain that pumps real water—my grandchildren love it!

I think gingerbread houses are beautiful, but I don’t have the patience to build one myself—the icing never sets properly for me. And then I’m just like Tina: I’m always tempted to snack on it!

@tina,
Gingerbread is meant to be eaten☺.

Nativity scenes aren’t really my thing

We’ve made gingerbread houses quite a few times, though. First, they sit around for a while as decorations (wrapped in plastic to keep out cat hair and dust), and then eventually we start munching on them. The ingredients are just too good to waste on something we won’t actually eat...
Maybe as an alternative, we should try making a purely decorative gingerbread house out of salt dough or modeling clay… then the temptation to eat it would be zero…

We, like all Catholics and Lutherans (or their descendants) in the USSR, had always secretly celebrated Christmas on the 24th (just as Orthodox Christians always secretly celebrated it on January 6), but outwardly we were all dutifully atheist, and a nativity scene wouldn’t really fit that image. So we didn’t have any nativity scenes, and I didn’t even know such things existed until I came to Germany. I generally find them beautiful—especially large wooden nativity scenes—but not so much because of the religious background, but because I love anything handmade and the theme of birth fundamentally moves me.
I just think gingerbread houses are pretty to look at; I don’t really want to eat them—to me, they just don’t look like food :-).