For as long as I can remember, we have been making ginger bread houses each Christmas. Admittedly, the stakes have gotten higher since Tyler joined the family; his inner engineer cannot be tamed and exacto knives are used to precisely trim licorice and fruit stripe gum.

As these pictures reveal it is ALL ABOUT the candy.  We gave up on baking our own gingerbread years ago and purchase kits wherever we find them.  This makes this project very accessible to the kiddies and wonderfully nostalgic for the grownups. Last year we were happy to find these simple kits from Anna’s that went together easily and withheld the weight of ALL THAT CANDY!

We take a lot of pictures every year – and truth be told they all sort of run together, but this year we discovered that the overhead view of our candy creations made colorful abstract compositions. My favorite is the center photo of  my Ridley’s roof, at three and a half years old this kind of access to candy is really inspiring.  His layering was made possible by multiple decorating sessions.

In the end this was just the push I needed to finally draw a gingerbread house for our 2009 Holiday Collection.  What might this inspire in you??

Tags: Candy, Children, Christmas, Crafts

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 6th, 2009 at 10:29 am and is filed under Holidays, Treats. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.