Family Traditions for Christmas-On the Cheap Part IV
Today: Gingerbread Houses
Quite a few years ago now, my eldest sister decided to decorate a gingerbread house with her family. It happened to be a year that Cici (our mom) had gone to visit. Much fun was had by all. Somehow (totally type C) this single gingerbread house has expanded into a family wide tradition that is actually more for the adults than the kids. Although don’t get me wrong, the little ones love the accompanying sugar rush!
Hence the annual gingerbread house contest-a contest without winners or prizes! Every year each household in the family who wants to participate makes a gingerbread house sometime before Christmas, and posts the pictures online at our family website.. We have gotten quite competitive and creative (like when Bick and her husband had Dr. Ted over last year and built a gated community next to a slum).
Gingerbread house decorating may sound lame, but it is one of those things that winds up being more fun than you think. Cici, who is now the biggest proponent of the contest, didn’t think it was going to be much fun that first year. 2 years ago, when we were still in the Army, we invited some of our friends over to decorate with us. The husband, a retired Army Command Sergeant Major, wasn’t so into the idea. By the end he was totally into it and directing traffic on how his wife and son were decorating.
This is a tradition that can be done relatively inexpensively, or you can spend a whole heck of a lot. It all depends on what you buy. I got the basic gingerbread house at AC Moore this year for $8. That includes the baked pieces, icing mix, icing bags and some basic candy. The candy they give you is never enough, and never creative enough, so we of course go out and buy more. That “buying more†portion is where you can run into some serious cash! Some ways to cut the cost would be to bake your own gingerbread (I’ll try that eventually) and to buy your candy on sale throughout the year with decorating in mind. Also, you can think nontraditionally for the decorating. Our rule is you can use anything as long as it is edible. So we have crackers for roofing tiles, pretzels as logs, coconut as snow etc.
Some tips and tricks if you decide to try the gingerbread house thing.
#1-You must assemble the house the day before you want to decorate. The icing “mortar†takes a while to dry. If you try to do it all at once it will fall apart on you.
#2-You should use canned goods to hold the walls up (sandwich style) until the icing dries, then take them out and mortar on the roof.
#3-If you are picky about how your house turns out, you may want to make the kiddos their own house to decorate. I usually make the kids their own little mini house out of graham crackers so they can decorate it however they want, then DH and I work on the big one. I told you we all get a bit competitive!
#4-Don’t forget the savory items in your cupboards like dry cereals, crackers, snack foods etc when decorating.
Instead of buying kits, we as a family build our own ginger bread houses out of graham crackers, using royal icing we make ourselves. That way we can dye it, too, without having to buy colored icing.
Of course, you always need more than one box of graham crackers, just in case your box went through the wringer and they’re all broken.
We also use chex, cheerios, or whatever cereal we have on hand to help decorate.
Of course, my father always gets out the dremel and builds things like a scale replica of Notre Dame de Paris. The rest of us build outhouses and trailer parks.
I started doing a gingerbread house a few years ago. My kids still love it even though they are older now, 2 in college and 1 in 8th grade. You can do so many different things, some years we just see how much candy we can fit on without the house collapsing! This year I wanted to use mainly swedish fish and design it as a fish camp, with ice fishing gingerbread men, etc, but we all like swedish fish and the candy never made it onto the house! Oh well, next trip out, more swedish fish…
As far as bringing the family together; we made ours at the Army base in the south pacific last Christmas. It was fun to see what all the otherts looked like compared to the ones your sister and our friends made. Bones.
Emily-I’m thinking that with my experiments in gingerbread baking this year, next year I should be ready to start baking my own houses!!!
R- aren’t themes fun? We’ve done the north pole harley shop, a log cabin, and tried to match it to the house we live in. It’s amazing how the “older” folks get even more into it sometimes. . .
Annette-let me know how it turns out.
Bones-I can’t wait to see what you come up with this year. Seeing all of the family’s houses is one of my favorite grown up traditions, next to the massive calling we all do to each other on Christmas eve and day!