A new holiday tradition!

My family's holiday traditions are somewhat strange. We celebrate Christmas on New Year's,  have never done Santa Claus, and eschew 'Miracle on 34th Street' in favor of  WWE's Christmas special wrestling programme Tribute to the Troops. Yes, we like entertainment wrestling. It's a guilty pleasure, except I don't feel guilty about it at all. 

This year I had an idea--instead of the gingerbread house that hasn't gotten made in years, I wanted to make a wrestling ring covered with candy! Yes, we watch WWE's Monday night RAW program every week. Five years ago, I would never, ever have predicted we'd become wrestling fans, but long story short, here we are.

 

On New Year's day, work began on the ring. I ahad settled on cinnamon and chocolate graham crackers for the structure, instead of gingerbread--saves so much time on preliminaries. My brothers Isaac and Elijah provided invaluable help with structural engineering, planning a stage layout that would support itself without a bothersome box support. It involved carefully-layered vertical graham cracker supports under the stage, and a lot of caramels. We wanted as much of the ring as possible to be edible.  Above is the ring's bare-bones structure. Isaac wrote 'W.com' on the side in royal icing, and wrapped the pink twine around the candy cane ringposts.

 

Here is the finished ring, all covered in random chocolate candy on the sides, with multicolored gummy candy on the floor of the ring itself, sort of like the rainbow lights in wrestler John Morrison's showy entrance display.

 

Another view of the ring from the front, with 'RAW' added. Look carefully to the right and you can see graham crackers gluing--it's going to be the announcers' table that gets landed on by wrestlers in particularly good main-event fights..

 

I took a lot of pictures.

 

The finished display, complete with candy-covered announcers' table and even a caramel wrestler figure with championship belt. This is a testament to my sculpting skills, or lack of them. ;) I had the foresight to stick him in the fridge to make him stiff enough to stand up, and Isaac put toothpicks in him as armatures, and got him to stand upright in the ring.

 

Caramel guy can be any wrestler we want.  Right now he's 'Randy Candy Orton', after wrestler Randy Orton. His is the only name that we can connect with candy. It ought to be Randy Kandy Orton (because his initials are RKO) but I can't bear to substitute Ks for Cs, so Candy it is.

 

Announcers' table.

 

After it was all finished, pictures taken and the ring was suitable admired by all, we did what naturally happens to wrestling equipment--trashed it! Demolished by the fist of justice. Now for the table. In wrestling, wrestlers land on top of the table, sending equipment flying. We couldn't do that level of stuntwork, but we did the next best thing--took the caramel guy, renamed him The Miz, after a hated wrestler, placed him on the announcers' table, and smashed the table with him on top. 

Then we ate the wreckage.

Happy holidays and new year, y'all.