Parentella

One of my family’s Christmas traditions is to make a gingerbread house. It’s a craft that holds my children’s interest and the finished masterpiece brings a bright spot to our mantle. Assembling a gingerbread house with young kids helping can be a bit of a challenge though, so over the years I’ve come up with a few tricks to make the process easier.

Use a kit

I love to bake — love it — but I never bake my own gingerbread house. I tried it once before, and found the gingerbread dough hard to work with, that I couldn’t get the pieces the right size and shape, and both pieces of the roof broke into multiple chunks. And this was back before I had kids who wanted to help me. Now, I pay $10 for a kit and most of the hard part is done for me.

Put the house together when they’re not around

The trickiest part of making a gingerbread house is putting the pieces together to make the house take shape. Though the process isn’t particularly hard, it requires a bit of concentration and it’s not really glamorous enough to hold a kid’s interest for long. Add the long drying time in and it can be a difficult time for even the most patient child. My suggestion is to put the house together when your kids aren’t around. Wait until they’ve gone to bed or school and you have a few minutes to concentrate on the task without interruption.

If you’re having trouble getting the pieces to stand up, use books and cans to hold the walls and roof in place while
the icing dries.

And if you’re really having trouble – and you’re not planning to eat the house later – I’ve heard you can use hot glue to assemble a house with good results.

Or put it together after it’s decorated

Alternately, try decorating the pieces before you assemble the house. You can lay the house pieces flat that way and let the kids go to town with no worries about candies sliding down the walls due to runny icing. When everything has dried up and the kids have lost interest in the project, that’s the time when you’ll want to slip in and put it all together into a house.

Buy candy the kids don’t like very much

I love a gingerbread house with a lot of candy on it, but when you put a bunch of candy down in front of children, they’re not always very good at showing restraint in eating it. My boys, for example, take this opportunity to shove big handfuls of candy into their mouths. I’m not opposed to them eating some candy while we make a house – that’s part of the fun, after all – but I don’t want them to eat so much that they get sick, and I don’t want to spend all of our crafting time telling them to stop eating. So that’s why I try to buy candy my kids don’t like very much. Some of my choices include peppermint hard candies and spice drops instead of gum drops.

Use a muffin tin to hold the candy

Instead of scattering lots of small bags of candy around the table, which can get quite messy, organize the candy in a muffin tin. It’s much less likely to spill or get knocked over and it helps everyone see what their options are.

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Wendy Copley writes about cooking, crafts, parenting and her obsession with lunch boxes at Wendolonia.

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Tags: christmas, crafts for kids, gingerbread houses, winter holidays

This entry was posted on Monday, December 20th, 2010 at 12:01 am and is filed under Food, Holidays, Wendy Copley, arts and crafts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.