Gingerbread House Year 4; the biggest and best yet!

This has become my favorite Christmas tradition with my kids; decorating gingerbread houses. In years past we've glued together graham crackers and decorated small houses.  

But this year I decided we needed to get a bit more sophisticated and challenge ourselves a bit. 

I found some large cardboard and hot glued a house together real quick, the chimney is out of proportion but it worked. 

Then I pulled out leftover Halloween candy from the refrigerator and Christmas candy from a parade we went to a couple weeks ago. We had a LOT more candy than I thought, surely more than enough. 

The boys decided they needed to separate the candy by colors and then they went at it! 

While the boys worked on the house, Yahoo and I decorated ice cream cones to look like trees. 

Surprisingly, a very small amount of candy was eaten!

The only candy I ended up buying for this project was licorice for the chimney. 

One hour later our house was done!! 

And there wasn't ONE piece of candy left in the house....they used it all!! 

LOL...they even used some Halloween suckers with bony hands! 

See the one sticking out of the chimney? Yip says that it's Santa's hand after he fell in the fireplace fire. 

During our "creative" building process Yip suggested that next year we make a skyscraper gingerbread house! How cool would that be?? I've been envisioning what this yearly tradition might grow into the older my kids get. Might we start making an entire village? Will we have to invest a large chunk of our Christmas budget into candy for decorating? Will our gingerbread houses morph into entire room installations? The possibilities are endless!!!