Our Gingerbread House Making Experience

Our Gingerbread House. (Can you tell the kids helped?)

Gulick's Gingerbread House! Theirs many look better, but that chimney doesn't look very safe.

Making gingerbread houses has been quite the challenge this year. It all started 2 Sundays ago (that would have been the 16th). We were going to have friends over to decorate them after church so late Saturday night I made a trip to multiple stores (I hate shopping in the east) to find candy for decorating. Well on Sunday while trying to put the houses together we had many cracks and breaks. So many that we only got one gingerbread house made. (Kenny insisted on making them from scratch. It's a cool idea, but it's turned out to be a lot of work.) So we canceled Sunday's gingerbread houses and went for Thursday, the next free night we had.

Sarah Kate decorating cookies!

Thursday would have been all good and wonderful, but two nights before we had decided we weren't going to Delaware over the weekend and so our weekend was suddenly freed up. So the logical thing to do was to make the gingerbread houses on a weekend night where the kids didn't have school the next morning and we could stay up later. So we shot for Saturday.

Ben "decorating" cookies!

Saturday was a crazy day at the Newbry household. I don't know if it was the excitement of Christmas coming soon, the fact that Sarah Kate was going to be out of school for a week and a half, or something else, but our children were not good. They had a VERY, VERY hard day of not listening, fighting, tattling, you know the whole nine yards. Ben even referred to Saturday as the worst day ever. Their naughtiness finally resulted in a cancellation of the gingerbread house making. So we thought that was the end of gingerbread house making for this year. Sunday we were going back to the temple to see the lights with Winns (which we didn't get to do because it was pouring rain) and Monday was Christmas Eve.

All Hannah was interesting in was eating the candy. She had a blast.

Wow, this has turned out to be a long story. On Monday morning I went to exercise class with a friend (one we were originally going to make gingerbread houses with) while her husband brought their kids over to our house to play with our kids. While the Dad's were talking they cooked up a plan to get together that night and have pizza. It just snowballed from there. We had pizza, made bracelets and necklaces out of beads, made and decorated cookies for Santa, and FINALLY decorated our gingerbread houses. It was a lot of fun.

Every gingerbread house needs gum drops.

Gulicks perfecting their gingerbread house.