Wednesday, November 28, 2007

Gingerbread 2007!

Every year, starting with the year we moved away from home, we've made a gingerbread house over the Thanksgiving holiday to kick off our Christmas decorating, and every year we've had a great time designing the home in cardboard, baking the gingerbread, pulling out the rasp to even up the edges after it's baked (because obviously we're not all that great at measuring!), gluing it together and then letting the kids add the candy. It's a lot of work, but it's also been really fun memories and great experiences.

Well, we finally did our gingerbread house this year, but I slacked off and bought the Target version for the sake of maintaining the tradition. The biggest difference in Thanksgiving holidays away from home and then back in Utah is the time we usually spend on Gingerbread and other things is swallowed up by even greater good - time with family! Anyway, so we're a little late on this one, but we're here, and the kids had a great time!

My methodical decorators... they were rather meticulous decorating their individual sides.


And the whole gang - this was the closest we allowed Audrey to get to this year's house... she was much more interested in taking the candy off, than in putting it on. But really, aren't we all?


The finished product - Gingerbread 2007! To be completely honest, I was pleased when the kids started asking when we were going to do our gingerbread house this year, and that they missed it over Thanksgiving. We may get back to doing the homemade thing at some point, but the point of it being a tradition wasn't lost on the kids, and the joy in that wasn't lost on me. :-) Happy Holidays!

3 comments:

Cheryl said...

Homemade, Target version, guarantee the kids didn't know the difference. What a fun tradition. We once made gingerbread houses out of graham crackers at the Larsen Thanksgiving party and it was one of the funnest things we ever did.

I may just have to copy this one for myself! It turned out so well!

Laura F said...

It's so much fun... I realized after I posted that the reason we started doing them at all, and did the homemade ones, is because we had so much time over the holiday sans family that first year... I was anxious to start our own traditions, etc. It's been a good one, and that target one was SO simple!

Amanda said...

So much fun! We started the same tradition with our family last year, except we did a gingerbread train instead of a house. We decided that we would do something gingerbread each year, although the train was a lot of fun, we'll probably do that again. That's the only thing Christmas-y that I brought to England with me. It was a lot of work, which Clark and I did on our own last year, but I think Kimball will enjoy it this year. They do have a gingerbread house at Costco here that we can buy, so if all else fails, we'll buy that one.