New Christmas Traditions

Growing up one of my favorite Holiday season crafts was building a gingerbread house.  The excitement of the long awaited sugar high and the opportunity to express my creativity always sparked my interest.  For some reason the idea of building a gingerbread house is always much nicer than actually making one...

This year we've started new traditions, one of them is a night of making gingerbread houses and gingerbread men with friends.  Christmas is fast approaching and for some reason, this is the season for busyness... getting this night scheduled happened fast because of that and unfortunately not everyone could make it.  But we made them cookies anyway! :0)

Jami and Angie came over after work last night for some delicious dinner (homemade beef fajitas with homemade chips and salsa!) and then a night of messy, sticky, ooey, gooey, sugary fun. 

In years past I've made gingerbread houses completely from scratch, no molds no forms... And they never really turned out that great.  So this year I did a little research and discovered graham cracker houses.  After watching a few tutorials I decided this would be the way to go.  So we attempted to make a beautiful, sweet home... This is how the night progressed:

Yummy candy!

We were THIS close to being finished when the entire thing collapsed...

We were sad...

But we had fun... so we were still happy!

And even happier when we realized that we could now eat it!

The night was a blast but since we missed our other friends so much we decided to make them each a cookie...

We came to a decision that next year, we will plan this event on a Saturday and spend the entire day preparing and decorating houses.  Maybe we'll even get brave enough to have a competition!  Either way, this was a great way to get the tradition started and I look forward to many more years of sticky, ooey, gooey, sugary fun with my friends!