Christmas in geekdom

Two absolutely awesome holiday projects to share with you today. And I can't take credit for making or even attempting either of them.

The first is this absolutely awesome gingerbread AT-AT complete with little gingerbread dude swinging from a rope beneath the belly ready for AT-AT destruction and a nice big boom.

(Found via.) At first I must admit that I got a little huffy because I thought the gingerbread dude was supposed to be an Ewok and, if this is an Ewok, then this is totally the wrong sort of Imperial walker (the Ewoks attacked the two-legged kind that were on the jungle moon of Endor). Then I looked a bit more closely at the gingerbread dude. No ears. A helmet. Sort of a snowsuit collar and boots. Oh, oh, oh! That's not an Ewok, that's Skywalker! Sorry, my bad. It's so hard to tell humans from annoyingly cute savages who like to roast their sacrifices over the fire while still alive.

This gingerbread walker is rightfully the four-legged kind from the ice planet of Hoth. Duh: Christmas = ice planet + gingerbread -- it took me a while, but now I'm on board.

The next exhibit I have from Christmas in geekdom is what the site BuzzFeed is calling DIY Holiday Nerdflakes. They're instructions/patterns for how to make paper snowflakes featuring shapes from all our favorite sci-fi shows. This one is the starship Enterprise.

They also have patterns for a Tardis, a Cylon, storm troopers and bounty hunter masks. But I think my favorite is the laughing Darth Vader because he looks a little like a malevolent Santa. And I bet that if you make that snow flake and showed it to your non-initiated friends (those who've never come to play in the land of geekdom), that they'd never realize that it wasn't Santa and then you'd have the joy of having pulled one over on them. Of course, they might start to wonder what that strange cog-like shape was in the middle of the flake, but just tell them it's a geometric pattern not the not the symbol of evil that made the galaxy shudder. Wha, ha, ha! Ahem, I mean, Ho, ho, ho!