Decorating Our Gingerbread House

The past couple of years we’ve saved this activity for Christmas Eve morning. It was fun to have Emory decorating her gingerbread house while I was making some kind of sweet for Christmas Day, but I always regretted not having made it earlier so that we could enjoy the finished product for longer! Well this year we decided to schedule it early, so after church we put the boys down for naps and pulled out all of our supplies…

I’ve learned that while the kids are young, the pre-assembled houses are the way to go. There’s not waiting for icing to harden before they can put candy on. This particular kit was scored to where all I had to do was trace over the lines with the icing!

She always gets a little giggly when we start. She’s not very good at hiding her excitement!

Her OCD is bothersome at times, but during activities like this I love it! Before she began, we had to come up with a plan of what candies were gonna go where and she decided on a ‘paterin’ {pattern} of red & green.

We used some green skittles on the very top and I told her to make sure the ‘s’ was on the bottom so it wouldn’t show, and she enjoyed inspecting each piece to find the letter.

After all those red and green dots on the roof she got a little tired and decided she just wanted a big ‘ole jelly bean in each window.

We decorated the front of the house with sugared trees, and the side of the house with tootsie roll ‘firewood’.

After adding a little cobblestone walkway, her house was complete!

And we couldn’t miss re-creating our ‘I’m gonna take a bite!’ picture from last year…

I think this was definitely the last year we could get away with not including any of the other kiddos in the process, which is bittersweet. I know it’ll be fun to have an entire little village of decorated houses next year, and to see the boys piling candy on  while sneaking bites, but it’s a little difficult to let go of the special time with ‘just the girls’ as Emory calls it.

We scattered some coconut around the bottom to look like ‘snow’ and now we get to look at her beautiful creation all season! Thanks, Aunt Boo, for hanging with us while we decorated!