Best Family Christmas Activities to Make Gingerbread Houses

I’m super excited to bring you today’s post. Today I’m sharing with you my one of my all time favorite Christmas Activities – making gingerbread houses!  My parent’s started this activity with their, then young, family in 1976. I was 5, my brother was 7. To my knowledge, not a year has passed that we have not made Gingerbread houses! Now we have moved on to another generation making gingerbread houses every year.

We have had countless families, friends and relatives come make houses with us. When Mr. T and I moved away from my home state, to another state. We took the tradition with us through 2 different states. Now we have family only an hour away. The tradition has become bi-coastal. My family and my relatives here, making houses each year. My parents, my brother, relatives, and friends in my home state making them there. 

It’s always a favorite among our Christmas activities. I’m pretty certain it is amongst my cousins and my brother as well. “When are we doing Gingerbread houses?” is a common question this time of year. We all have so many memories and share so many stories.

Like in 2005, when we had a small plastic fire. We call that the year we almost burnt down the house…the real house. Or 2006, when I mostly held my not even 2 month old rather than making a house. On a totally unrelated note, don’t you just love the color of the kitchen in 2006? We had just moved into the house 12 days before Pumpkin was born, in a cross country move. Hadn’t had time to paint yet…so ugly! 2007 is a great memory because it is the only year I ever got to make a house with my Grandma. We have had my parents with us a number of years even though we live across the country from them now. You can see how the families have all grown and change (and these are just the digital era pictures), one house and one year at a time.

The thing, aside from the fun with family and all the yummy candy, that makes the building of the houses so fun is that they come out different every time. It is also so fun to be creative and see what new ideas we come up with from year to year. One year, someone found gummy letters and we were able to label our gingerbread house so Santa would know where to leave gifts. 😉 Another year, we used ice cream cones upside down with sprinkles to make trees. We sometimes use the extra logs to make benches, garages, teeter totters. You can see some of these things above along with a licorice slide Snowflake made one year. She worked so hard on that slide. 

Sometimes the houses come out quite tall.

Other times, they come out quite short. We have even had adobe style homes. That is the fun! There is so much creativity to be had with this one family Christmas activity.

Now in case you haven’t notice, there is also A LOT of candy involved in this activity. That part is funny to me. I remember growing up, we only had one set of cousins who lived in our hometown. We would get together with them each year to build houses. Of course, my brother and I, in our we are older ‘wisdom and maturity,’ always teased the little kids at how much candy they put on their houses.

As we always eat our houses, the more candy you get on, the more you have to eat later. They were really good at getting the candy on! What is funny to me about that part of the tradition is that now, both my brother and I have kids….guess what their goal is? Well, aside from eating as much candy as possible while making a gingerbread house, their goal is to get the most candy on the house as they can! So it continues…

To add this to your Christmas activities, get the recipe and pattern to make your gingerbread houses in this post. I hope you do and that you love it as much as our family loves it!