I close the front door and follow my sister into the kitchen, where my mother and brother are gathered around our small island, huddled over something. Landry sets the speaker on the counter and plugs it in, because the stupid thing has never been able to hold a charge. She taps something on her phone, and Christmas music starts playing over the speaker.

“Hey!” My mother stands with a tube of icing in one hand and a big, square cookie in the other, and suddenly I understand.

They’re making a gingerbread house.

Or rather, they’re putting together a premade gingerbread house, from a kit.

“They were on clearance!” Landry announces as she steals a piece of candy-coated chocolate—a generic M&M—from a bowl on the end of the island. “Even though it’s still three days until Christmas!”

“Wrapping paper and lights were on sale too,” Penn says around a chunk of something sticky. There’s an empty candy wrapper on the counter next to him.

“When I was a kid, my parents always bought clearance wrapping paper and lights the week after Christmas,” my mom says. “But now the stores put everything on clearance a week before the actual holiday, assuming everyone’s already done decorating for the year. Boy, have they underestimated the Bergen family’s willingness to procrastinate!”

“Hey, can you hold this?” Penn nods at the gingerbread wall he’s propped into place. “So I can glue it?”

I hold the wall—another big, square cookie—while he squirts thick white frosting on one edge, then I place it where he shows me, pressing the frosted edge against another big cookie to form the corner of this super-basic gingerbread house.

We used to do this for real. Mom and I used to make homemade gingerbread dough, while Dad and Penn sketched out a design for the house. Then we’d roll out the dough and measure and cut the pieces, while Landry danced around in Christmas pajamas and a Santa hat, because she was too little to help, until we got to the part where she could glue on pieces of candy.

She used to eat as much as she put on the house.

We haven’t done that in three years now. Dad was deployed three Christmases ago, and it didn’t feel right to make a gingerbread house without him. The Christmas after that, he was in rehab. And last Christmas, he was “sick.”

But now …

It’s not the same. The picture on the box is of a very simple square house, decorated with the very basic collection of candy that came with the kit. But Landry’s smiling as she helps Mom glue on a section of roof. Penn’s biting his lip while he uses a can of green beans to support the piece I just helped him glue on, while the frosting hardens.