Peace and gingerbread houses

I shamelessly copied this PEACE garland from soulemama's blog. I went to Arbuckle's and got 2 yards of this amazing wool blend felt (72"wide) for just $5 since it was the end of the bolt. This retails for $10 plus per yard usually. I was thrilled. My plan (for years now) has been to make us all blue felt stockings and to cut snowflake designs out of the cuff. That won't happen for this Christmas, but it will for next!

The kids made graham cracker 'gingerbread' houses using juice cartons yesterday. I pretty much let them do whatever, since hands free time is limited with the babe and I harbored no illusions of trying to make them 'perfect'. They did a great job and proclaimed their houses 'the best ever'. And having friends over really made it a party. It was easy and fun and they turned out perfect, after all.

Me and gingerbread go way back. We had a cast iron gingerbread house mold growing up and traditionally we would make and decorate a house with our cousins every Christmas, hiding more candy inside and then after the family dinner we would have a tear-it-apart-free-for-all. It was like a pinata of sorts.

7 or 8 years ago for a Christmas present, I decided to make my parents a gingerbread replica of their 1875 brick house. I made a posterboard model and used the pieces as a pattern to cut the gingerbread. I cut out the windows and when I assembled it I glued vellum to the windows, little strips of paper for the windowpanes. I assembled the house on our pizza pan and glued little candy wreaths to the doors. Inside the house I put a strand of battery operated white lights. I used Big Red gum for the brick sidewalks around the house. My parents loved it! I think last year it fell apart due to being in a storage closet and subjected to an unfortunate roof leak. I think I have a couple grainy pictures of it, unfortunately this was before we had a good digital camera and I didn't think to take pics in the process of making it. I loved it though.