Graham Cracker Houses and Gingerbread Snowboys/girls!

It used to be tradition in our house to do a lot of holiday baking, including A gingerbread HOUSE!  Our traditions didn't hold up during all the changes that took place in our lives over the course of the last few years, but now that we've been settled on our own for the past year...we started up some of those traditions again.  While we didn't do all the baking we normally did, we did have some fun with gingerbread! 

We always made one gingerbread house when the older kids were younger...but they are at the age now, where they each wanted their own house.  So, it seemed we were going to have a gingerbread village this year. 

I started out by making 4 batches of dough, thinking that would be enough.  As we rolled out our dough...I found out that it took one batch of dough and an entire cookie sheet to bake just one whole house.  After baking the first one, I decided to switch to a quicker version of a gingerbread house...after all, we needed 7 houses for our village, as we also had my niece that day!  

I also discovered that I no longer had a gingerbread man cookie cutter, so we had to settle for a snowman cutter.

We stayed busy for HOURS and the kids had so much fun.  We made some wonderful Christmas memories and I hope I have the patience next year to let them all do it again and maybe invite a few more people to join us.  I think this is a tradition that the kids will definately always look forward to, once again!

If we would have had a contest...Duckling would have won for being the cutest, lol.  A quick glance and you would think her gingerbread snowgirl is somewhat inappropriate.  Being a nursing toddler....she also nurses her baby dolls, her stuffed animals....and well, she obviously thinks her gingerbread cookie needs tata's.  As Cardinal was helping her, she asked for Tata's.  To be funny...Cardinal granted her wish, giggled and quickly wiped them off.  Duckling got very upset, in a two year old kind of way...and well, Cardinal put the Tata's back.  Duckling was so proud of her cookie and she definately made for a very memorable year making our gingerbread.