It's December 6, do you know where your gingerbread house is?

As Robin already told us, making gingerbread houses is fun and easy. It's a great way to celebrate with family and friends, while creating something decorative and giving you an excuse to buy and eat tons of candy, too.

And I mean TONS of candy.


The front and back of my wonderful MIL & FIL's house.

As I always do, I obeyed Robin's bossing and after hosting 17 people at my house for Thanksgiving dinner, we made gingerbread houses. Which really should be called candy houses, because they are mostly made of candy with lots of frosting and a few graham crackers and absolutely no gingerbread. And in fact, calling what we made "houses" isn't really accurate since we ended up with 3 houses (one with turret, very handy in the suburbs), a ship, and a bridge.

The Golden Gate Bridge, my BIL Matt's contribution. Apparently SF sold the GGB for advertising for honeymaid graham crackers. Also pictured is the Candy Caine Mutiny, by clever punster and famous sportscaster BIL Rick.

Adorable cottage by BIL Jordan and SIL Ashley. We call them Jordash.

In my family, there is very little competition and mostly a lot of cooperation. Which is why we all work together to make one big house. This year I hosted my husband's family, some of my favorite people ever, and I knew without a competitive hook there would be little or no participation from the men. So we had a competition of sorts, with each couple making their own structure.

Mine. It's now sitting on my fireplace mantle. My husband helped too. Thanks honey.

This is how it went:
I spent a small fortune on candy.
We cranked up the Christmas music (too loud at one point, made the babies cry).
We stayed up ridiculously late.
It was really fun! Until we had to clean up.
I had enough leftover candy to feed an army. Well, to feed them dessert.

As you may recall, Robin bossily told us to send pictures of our houses, so I dutifully took lots of photos.

Our impressive creations.

What I will do differently next time:

• Go to a drugstore for creative candy options. Even Target didn't have a great selection of colorful candy.
• Still buy tons of candy.
• Instead of every couple making their own houses, I will either pre-make small houses for everyone to decorate (see below), or just make two houses--women against men (drawing on an idea from Robin's Par-tay post).
• We will not do the decorating in the formal dining room, even though it's the largest table surface we have. Instead, we will go to Hawaii and do it on the lanai. Or at least go to the kitchen or the backyard here at home.
• Start before 8 PM so we can go to bed before midnight.

So what did I do with all the leftover candy? Eat it? Of course. I mean of course not! We made more gingerbread houses! Yesterday I invited some of our little buddies over to make little gingerbread (candy and graham cracker, really) houses. The houses I made ahead (if you do this, make them a full day in advance so the frosting is dry and strong enough to withstand 3yo decorating pressure). Set out the leftover candy on the backyard table, give the moms some frosting, and let the creativity flow.

The houses. Pretty simple.

This is about 1/3 of the leftover candy.

One of the finished candy houses.

The four houses with enough structural integrity to survive the decorating process. I sense a sunday school analogy here.

There was a little demolition, and a little licking of the houses, but mostly very satisfied guests. It was really fun and not too messy.

Candy joy.

Have you made your gingerbread house yet? It's fun! Try it! Then send us a picture to bossysisters@gmail.com by Dec 22 and we will pick a winner to be featured here at Bossy! Also send your worst, wreckiest pictures, and if we get any bad enough we will do a cake wrecks-style Gingerbread House Wrecks award. Happy decorating!