There are friendships that walk beside you through life in soft, steady steps — and then there are friendships like mine and Renee’s, the kind woven so tightly into your history that they feel like part of your origin story.
We met in high school (she, a freshman; me, a senior), long before careers and marriages and motherhood. Our lives have taken us to opposite sides of the country and also a few miles away from one another. We’ve gone through so many changes, hiccups, relationships and identities, and somehow, through all the people we became — and unbecome — we’ve stayed tethered. Not just in the celebratory chapters, but in the gritty, vulnerable ones too.
Serendipitously in our 30s, our motherhood timelines became entwined in that special way that feels almost scripted. When I delivered my second daughter, Renee brought me sushi to celebrate the end of pregnancies, even though hours earlier, she had taken a pregnancy test herself. She waited a week to tell me and as I realized we’ve be going through postpartum periods together, it somehow felt meant to be.
Now she’s navigating life with a chaotic four-month-old, and I’m deep in the beautiful, chaotic trenches with two under 3.5. We’re both in the season of sticky hands, nap schedules, sleep regressions and limited alone time: but also in the season of softness, sentimentality and rediscovering ourselves through the tiny humans we’re raising.
Which is why, when the Omni Grove Park Inn invited us to experience the National Gingerbread House Competition from behind the scenes — something we’d grown up admiring from afar — it felt like the perfect excuse for a long-overdue friend-aversary staycation. There’s something full-circle about experiencing an Asheville tradition you’ve known since childhood from the inside, especially with the friend who has known every version of you and loves you anyway.
Checking In: From Local Girls to Guests of Honor
Even as locals who have visited the Grove Park countless times, walking into the Great Hall at Christmastime never stops being magical. The massive stone fireplaces, the towering Christmas trees, the warmth radiating from the embers: it’s a sensory timestamp of the holidays in Asheville. But walking in for a girls’ getaway, with no diaper bag, no strollers, no goldfish crackers hidden in the pockets of our jackets, felt different. It felt like exhaling.
We arrived just in time for the Competitor Meet & Greet, where gingerbread artists — some professional pastry chefs, others creative hobbyists — mingled with a mix of excitement and nerves. It was inspiring meeting the minds behind the displays we’ve admired since we were kids. You could feel the history of the tradition pulsing through the room, alongside the palpable relief of its return after last year’s cancellation due to Hurricane Helene.
Dinner followed at EDISON craft kitchen + ales, where we found ourselves (gasp!) eating while our food was still hot and finishing sentences without being interrupted. It felt like stepping back into an earlier version of ourselves, only softer and more grounded. As someone with a garlic allergy, it can sometimes be challenging to find something to eat on a menu, and sadly, EDISON didn’t live up to my expectations. While they accommodated me, they didn’t make an effort to ensure the dishes still had full flavor profiles, serving me very dry options while everyone around me had dips, sauces and spreads. It was disappointing for such a high-quality resort and an expansive food and beverage program.
A Private Spa Night: The Kind of Quiet That Mothers Dream About
After dinner, we slipped into plush robes and made our way to The Spa at the Omni Grove Park Inn where we had the treat of experiencing ‘after hours’ with no one but the journalists and influencers on the press trip. When I say it was a treat, I really mean it: it was exactly what these two mamas needed.
We floated in the underground mineral pool, letting the warmth seep into sore joints from holding babies. We lingered in the steam room. We sat in silence. We swam. We relaxed. It was dreamy to say the very least.
After our spa experience, we didn’t want the night to end quite yet, so like those 20-something versions of ourselves, we ordered one more cocktail to bring up to the room. But like our 30-something selves, we decided to pair it with a face mask in bed while chatting and looking at photos of our babies.
Slow Morning, Hot Coffee, and the Freedom of an Unhurried Breakfast
The next morning, we woke up on our own, not to a crying baby or a toddler yelling “MOMMY WHERE ARE YOU?!” from another room. Just … naturally. It felt decadent. Almost illegal?
We wandered down to the Blue Ridge Dining Room for breakfast, soaking in mountain views and lingering over coffee like people on vacation, not people racing the clock before daycare drop-off. We enjoyed biscuits and gravy, grits, pastries, pancakes and eggs and talked about nothing important and everything important.
Spa Day, Massages & A Very Dramatic Cold Plunge
Later that afternoon, we returned to the spa for our Grove Park Classic Massages, scheduled at the perfect time where we didn’t have to rush out for another event immediately afterward.
My massage felt like someone took the weight of carrying two kids off my shoulders, literally. And for Renee, who is still in the raw, tender months postpartum, it was the first time she felt someone caring for her body in months, not demanding it.
And then came the cold plunge: a moment that deserves its own paragraph. We counted to three, grabbed each other’s hands like teenagers about to jump into a lake, screamed louder than necessary, plunged in and came out laughing so hard we cried. It was shocking, hilarious, and the perfect metaphor for our friendship: sometimes you jump into the cold things together and come out braver because of it. Plot twist: we even did it one more time just to prove we could. Again, a little like friendship and a lot like motherhood.
The Gingerbread Competition: A Local Tradition, Reimagined
By evening, it was time for the National Gingerbread House Competition Awards Ceremony, held in the Grand Ballroom. For us, as Asheville natives, this event is more than a competition — it’s a holiday touchstone. We’ve grown up weaving through the inn to see the displays, year after year, first with hot chocolate in hand, and later with wine, often with family visiting from out of town. But we’d never seen the event from the inside.
This year’s competition felt especially meaningful after last year’s cancellation. The Inn welcomed 235 entries from 25 states, and the entire atmosphere buzzed with gratitude, the kind of collective sigh that comes only after something beloved returns.
The judging panel featured major culinary names, including celebrity cake artist Yolanda Gampp, along with respected pastry experts like John Cook, Steven Stellingwerf, Jae Park, and Asheville’s own Ashleigh Shanti. Together, they evaluated entries on creativity, difficulty, precision, overall impact, and adherence to the rules: 75% gingerbread, 100% edible.
Watching the winners beam with pride, hearing the applause echo through the ballroom, seeing families hug and cry, it all felt deeply emotional in a way I didn’t expect. Maybe because I grew up with this tradition. Maybe because I’m a mom now, seeing everything through a softer lens. Maybe because something about gingerbread — whimsical, fleeting, handmade — feels like the perfect metaphor for childhood
Dinner at Vue: A Different Kind of Nourishment
By the time we sat down at Vue 1913, something in both of us had shifted. Maybe it was the spa or the gingerbread awards or just the rare luxury of an entire day without anyone needing us. The dining room was warm and low-lit, the kind of place that makes you sit up a little straighter without realizing it. We ordered dirty martinis — because when else do mothers of small children ever get to order dirty martinis on a Monday night? — and when the drinks arrived, cold and briny and perfect, it felt like the beginning of something small but important.
The meal itself was wonderful and they went above and beyond to accommodate my garlic allergy, but it was the conversation that made the night feel memorable. It didn’t follow a theme or an arc. It moved in the way long friendships do, from postpartum hormones to old worries and new career ideas to the aches no one tells you about when you get older, to high school stories we’ve retold so many times they’ve become almost myth. There were moments when one of us got unexpectedly quiet, and the other knew exactly what that silence meant. There were moments when we laughed so hard our eyes watered, and neither of us bothered to wipe the tears.
What I felt, sitting across from her, wasn’t nostalgia. It was something deeper: the awareness that the people who’ve known you the longest hold a version of you you sometimes forget. A version that existed before responsibility, before sleep deprivation, before self-doubt crept in. Sharing a martini with that person doesn’t feel like “blessing the past and future”, it feels like remembering you still exist underneath it all.
The Slow Goodbye
The next morning, before reality reclaimed us, we lingered over one more breakfast. The dining room was quiet, the mountains blue and soft in the distance, and it felt like Asheville was giving us a gentle sendoff before we stepped back into our real lives: the car seats, the nap schedule, the crying tantrums, the fullness and fatigue of motherhood.
There is a particular loneliness that can settle into your bones when you’re raising very young children, even when you’re surrounded by love, village and support. It’s not isolation so much as the constant feeling of being needed before you can even register your own needs. And there is a tenderness in shared history that cuts through that loneliness in a way nothing else does.
We talked, on the way home, about how strange it is to return to a childhood tradition as adults, and how standing in the middle of the gingerbread awards made us realize that the things that felt magical when we were young still have the power to move us… maybe even more so now. The artistry, the dedication, the sense of community…it all felt like a reminder of how traditions tether us to place, to memory, to versions of ourselves we thought we’d outgrown.
And that’s what this girls’ trip ended up being: not a vacation, but a recalibration. A reminder that friendship deserves intention. That we deserve intention. That stepping outside the rhythm of motherhood for 48 hours can shift something quietly but profoundly in the spirit.
The truth is, nothing about those two days fixed our exhaustion or simplified our lives. We went home to the same chaos, the same tiny hands tugging at us, the same long nights. But we also went home steadier. Softer. Refilled in a way that isn’t dramatic, but unmistakable.
And maybe that’s the real magic of gingerbread, not the sugar or the spectacle, but the time it takes to make something beautiful. Time you carve out deliberately. Time you protect. Time you share. Time that reminds you that your own sweetness — the parts of you that existed long before motherhood — is still in there too.
