Twelve-year-old Nicola Claire must make her gingerbread house before she goes to sleep on Christmas Eve. She lives in Nuremberg, Germany, “The Gingerbread Capital of the World.” Although her mom wants her to go to bed, she sneaks back into the kitchen to finish her project. As Nicola places candy pieces artistically on the house as a creative masterpiece, she says how much she’d like to live in the gingerbread house. Nicola never feels like her mother understands her. She always tries to be good enough, but it never seems to be what her mother wants. Her father divorced her mother a few years ago. Sometimes, Nicola feels like she is invisible. She thinks if she lives in the gingerbread house by herself that she would not have the problems that she has with her parents.
When Nicola places her head on the table for a moment’s rest, she closes her eyes for a second, which then becomes minutes until she is asleep. In her dream, her stature shrinks, and she stands as tall as the gingerbread men in the kit, which is much smaller than real life. As the dream goes on, she wanders through the rooms of the gingerbread home and holiday candies enjoying the sweet-smelling house. She makes her way to the kitchen with a peppermint fireplace and meets a gingerbread man named Cinnamon hanging a sugar wreath. Cinnamon tells her that he hopes she will be able to find her way home by Christmas morning. Since Nicola is not even sure how she got where she is in the first place, she doesn’t know how to find her way home. She sits down on the chocolate bar floor and sheds hot tears, which melts part of the ground. Then, Cinnamon tells her a secret: if she eats the gingerbread house, it won’t exist, and she’ll soon be home. Since her stomach shrunk, she has no idea how to eat the entire gingerbread house. Cinnamon says with each piece she eats that she will become bigger, and the house will become smaller. He places a jug of milk on the table. As a warning, Cinnamon reminds Nicola of the looming cats in the neighborhood.
Nicola eats the gingerbread house one piece at a time. As she eats the home, she grows in stature. It becomes smaller, little by little. When the cats circle her, she tries to hide until they leave. She eats every last crumb of gingerbread, icing, and sugar. By the time she grows back into her real-life stature, Cinnamon is very tiny, and she picks him up to look at him. As a friend, she cannot possibly eat him, but he insists that she swallow him, too. He says he is a gingerbread man and made to be eaten by a lovely girl like Nicola. As she eats her gingerbread friend whole, she takes a big drink of milk afterwards. Then, she awakens back at her kitchen table in her family’s home on Christmas Eve. Standing beside her is the angel-like Christkind, admiring the gingerbread house that she half-built before dozing off into a dream. The Christkind hands her a stuffed gingerbread man as a Christmas gift named Cinnamon. Then, she finishes the gingerbread house before Christmas morning as a surprise for her mother, which they eat for breakfast. What a sweet Christmas!
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