It's the Most Wonderful Time of the Year

If you know me then you are well aware of the fact that I have a slight obsession with Christmas (and really just the holiday time frame in general). "All I Want for Christmas is You" along with a plethora of other Christmas carols can be heard blasting in my car, my cube at work, and my apartment beginning on November 1st. You can never start too early. Sorry Thanksgiving!  I apologize in advance for the absurd amount of holiday tradition, cooking, and crafting entries that I will undoubtedly post in the coming weeks, but without further ado my first holiday tradition is...

GINGERBREAD HOUSE DECORATING

Every Thanksgiving weekend, my sisters and I decorate a gingerbread house together. When I say my sisters, what this really means is Brooke and I decorate while Mandy pretends to help (she doesn't share the same enthusiasm that Brooke and I do for baking). The past couple years my mom has gotten us a Mini Gingerbread Village kit so we each assembled and decorated our own separate houses (which means dearest Mandy was forced to participate).

Gingerbread House Decorating 2011 - Can you guess which one Mandy made?
(I apologize for the awful picture quality)

This year my mom bought a Pre-Baked and Pre-Assembled Gingerbread House kit which I feel like was cheating slightly . The most challenging part of a gingerbread house is putting it together. It seems like we never get through a year without having at least one massive collapse (usually after we've decorated a good portion of it). Anyways, this year we got to avoid all that and just focus on making it pretty!

This kit came with the pre-assembled house, candy stars, candy canes, gumdrops, and gummy trees. We had some red, green, and white regular and mint m&ms at the house so we threw those into the mix as well.

Usually Brooke and I like to get creative and try to decorate with some other items not included in the kit. This year the selection at our house was pretty slim, but we did have some chocolate chip cookies my grandma had baked, dry roasted peanuts, and the m&ms pictured above. I also stumbled upon some adorable little gingerbread men on Black Friday at Target. If you like decorating, you can find some really awesome seasonal Wilton products in the holiday section there.

Obsessed. These have to be the cutest thing ever.

Mandy conveniently had physics homework to work on (who does homework over Thanksgiving break!?!? Such an overachiever!) so Brooke and I were on our own tackling this house. We decided to make a classy gingerbread house this year so we didn't go overboard with candy and used only a red/white/green color scheme. We used the peanuts for stonework if you will, and crumbled a cookie for the path to the front door. We also used some white sanding sugar to cover the frosting on the cardboard base to make it look more like snow.

Definitely an improvement over last year!

Considering what we had to work with, I think it turned out pretty cute! Maybe next year we will be more adventurous and try assembling one from scratch! If anyone else has any pictures of gingerbread houses they've decorated I would love to see them! Now what to do with my remaining 10 little gingerbread men...