Holiday Gingerbread House

ByDavid December 1, 2016April 6, 2021

Have you ever made a Holiday Gingerbread House? Here are some tips and tricks for this classic Christmas activity!

As a kid, Christmas always involved gingerbread houses. Big ones, small ones, fancy ones, simple ones. They all counted. And they were all over our house! I seriously think we had at least one gingerbread house in every room. You see, my mom got into making gingerbread houses…and then they sorta became a yearly tradition.

At first, my mom just made simple square houses for my sister and me to decorate. That soon turned into making multiple houses so our friends could come over and decorate them. She’d make the basic houses a couple of days before, and then set up bowls and jars of pretty much every kind of candy imaginable. We had a blast! And some of the candy even made it onto the houses.

That tradition continued for years, and it grew to the point that my mom would make enough houses for our entire grade to decorate. That was 50+ houses…and she’d do it for my grade as well as my sister’s grade. We’d all go into the lunchroom at our elementary school and decorate gingerbread houses. Like I said, gingerbread houses were just part of Christmas for us!

As we got older, my mom stopped making hundreds of little gingerbread houses and began making larger ones to serve as the centerpiece of our holiday table. She made all sorts of different houses. One of the most memorable houses was a replica of the Charleston-style single house where we grew up as kids.

Years later, when I got a job teaching Latin in Baton Rouge, LA, my mom made me a Roman temple gingerbread house. She didn’t tell me she made it, and when I flew up that year for Thanksgiving, she had this temple waiting on me. I hand-carried that bad boy back with me on the plane. The box didn’t fit in the overhead bin or under my feet…but I wasn’t about to check it. Instead, the flight attendant was nice enough to stash it at the bottom of her locker at the front of the plane. I bet that was the first (and last) time she helped transport a Roman temple gingerbread house!

But wait. The gingerbread house story continues! After my sister and I had moved out, my mother helped start a gingerbread house gala in downtown Raleigh. Every December, local restaurants and bakeries would create fantastic gingerbread houses. Some were replicas of iconic local buildings while others were just whimsical in nature. The houses were then displayed at a banquet-style event where folks could make silent bids on them. (The money was all donated to charity.) You guys, some of these houses were incredible! The bakers and chefs and pastry cooks must have spent days creating them.

Needless to say, I’m quite fond of making gingerbread houses. And my mom always used Honey Maid graham crackers for her gingerbread houses. She must have bought hundreds of boxes of graham crackers over the years! In fact, if I ever wanted a snack and it was anytime near Christmas, I could always wander into the kitchen and find some leftover scraps of graham crackers. Delicious!

So this year, I decided to take a stab at making my own holiday gingerbread house. When I was on my weekly grocery store run to Walmart, I grabbed some Honey Maid Graham Crackers and a whole assortment of candy…you know, for decorating purposes only. My mom used to use little milk cartons to provide stability for her houses. In fact, she’d go to our elementary school and collect the cartons from the lunchroom. Milk cartons seem to pretty much be a thing of the past now. So I decided to create this house with no box underneath. Honestly, it wasn’t that hard! I just took my time with making the cuts, and I let each stage dry before moving on. I’ve included a ‘recipe’ below, but here are some of the tips I learned:

Tips for Making a Holiday Gingerbread House

Take your time. Don’t try to rush the process. Take time to cut the graham crackers. Take time to attach the pieces together. Let the royal icing (aka “gingerbread house glue”) dry before moving onto the next step. Building a fun gingerbread house should be more of a slow job than a sprint!
Use a serrated knife to cut the graham crackers. I found that using a serrated knife to gently “saw” the graham crackers into the appropriate shapes led to less broken crackers. (That also meant less snacks for the carpenter…)
Cover the bowl of royal icing with a wet paper towel when not using it. Royal icing hardens quickly. The last thing you need is a whole bowl of rock solid royal icing!
Know that your house will not come out quite as planned. Be ok with it! I had originally intended to have windows on the roof of my house. I couldn’t get the windows to look right, so I scrapped that idea. (Well, ate that idea is more accurate.) No big deal. I decided to add a front porch instead. Adapt as you go! You may need to redo a certain cut once you begin to build the house. That’s ok!
And last but not least, have fun. Building a holiday gingerbread house should be a fun activity! Build the house itself one day, and then let the kids help you decorate it the next day. Enjoy the process…and take lots of pictures! Oh, and don’t eat all of the candy before you decorate the house.