The Christmas Tradition Of Making Gingerbread Houses

My big sister has always been the creative type and as a school teacher, she has often brought fun projects home to share with my family. One of those projects, which we have made a holiday tradition now for over 20 years, is decorating gingerbread houses on Christmas Eve.

When we started out we would make our gingerbread structures out of graham crackers over milk cartons just like her pre-schoolers would do. We made many an interesting structure expanding our houses to small towns for Christmas decorated with every candy we could find.

Photo by Shutterstock

As the years passed, we graduated to making our own gingerbread (which was quite messy) to these days buying those wonderful kits you can get for under twenty dollars that include the structure, candy and the whole works.

For example last year (2019), I built Elsa's castle from Frozen while my nephew and his girlfriend built a small Christmas village.

Photos by Nancy Brooks

Gingerbread houses are all the rage this year as movie star Reese Witherspoon just posted to Instagram her latest gingerbread house creation.

Reese wrote, "One of my favorite things about this time of year is decorating gingerbread houses with my kids, well... ok... we mostly just eat the candy. What are some of your favorite family traditions??"