Several years ago, before we had kids, Hubs and I started hosting an annual gingerbread house decorating party.  I’m not sure how we decided on gingerbread houses, but it was tons of fun.

We had lots of friends over for lots of candy, snacks, and gingerbread houses and even gave out prizes for the best and worst (all in good fun, of course) gingerbread houses, determined by votes, at the end of the night.

It was a tradition that we have kept going each year save the year that Little was born and was just 3 months old at Christmas.  But since then, it’s held strong.

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Our Annual Gingerbread House Party

Of course the party has evolved as we’ve added more kids to the group.  We ditched the competition and pushed the party to the morning instead of evening, and we’ve added fruit pouches to our snack line-up.  But the premise is still the same.  Everyone comes over (pajamas are welcome) for some laid-back, sweet, Christmas fun.

I love that it’s turned into a whole family event.  We look forward to it every year!  So, today I’m sharing some of the things we did this year to make the party even more fun with lots of kids around.

Spoiler alert: We do not use real gingerbread for this party – just regular old boxed graham crackers.  It works really well and everyone still loves it.

Make the Gingerbread Houses Ahead of Time

This was the first year we made the gingerbread houses ahead of time.  Each house used 5 graham cracker and we used hot glue to hold them together.  I wasn’t sure about using hot glue with the crackers, but it ended up working really well.

This is especially helpful with young kids because parents can come in, grab a house and start decorating with their kids rather than having to explain to the kids why they have to wait for the icing to dry so their houses don’t fall a part.

We put each house on a separate paper plate with each child’s name and a bag of icing to use.  (I make the icing the night before and add it to individual Zip-loc baggies.) We also made a few extras in case anyone came that didn’t RSVP.

This worked out really well and we’re doing it from now on.

Floating Schedule

Another thing we did was to have the party from 10-2, but floating so friends could come whenever it was best for their schedules.  Really glad we did it this way this year.  We had lots of snacks, and ended up ordering pizza around lunch time for people that were here then.

Snacks on Snacks

We kept it mostly simple this year.  I always have a tendency to think we need more than we actually do here.  I made some gingerbread man shaped sugar cookies and bought everything else.  We had some powdered donuts, popcorn, pretzels, fruit pouches, and little cheese cubes, which aren’t in the picture.

Pro Tip: Keep the bags and packages for things put away in the pantry for left overs.  We poured the pretzels and popcorn in bowls because it looks better and it’s easier for guests, but saved the bags for easy cleanup.

Keep the Candy Easy to Get to (& Easy to Take Away)

I’ve used these plastic organizer containers (similar here) since our first gingerbread party back in 2014 – they are PERFECT at keeping the candy organized and easily accessible.  I actually have two of these so we put one on each table.   It also makes it easy to take the candy away for a bit if parents need to, or when the decorating is over so kids don’t eat candy the whole time.

Twizzlers fit easily into mason jars.

This year, we used mini coffee filters for each child so they could get candy for decorating and move it to their own work station with the coffee filters.  It helped keep it less messy and helped parents portion out candy for their kids.

Other Simple Christmas Crafts for Younger Kids

We always try to have at least one other activity on hand at our gingerbread parties because not everyone loves decorating gingerbread houses.  And some kids aren’t quite big enough to enjoy it.

This year, I grabbed some pre-cut foam Christmas tree shapes and Christmas stickers from the craft store and put out some glitter glue pens we had on hand.  Stickers are really simple for little ones to use.  And it’s fun to let kids decorate their own Christmas trees.

Another fun idea is coloring sheets (which we had on back up this year, but ended up not using).  Even adults enjoy coloring sometimes.

Have Fun with It

We had a ton of fun at this year’s party.  We got to see lots of friends and family, ate way too much sugar, and laughed A LOT.  It’s always so much fun to see what everyone comes up with.  And the kids end up being so proud of their houses!

We had lots of fun ones this year!

And now, we are ready for Christmas!

If you want more fun tips on hosting your own gingerbread house, check out this post that I wrote for Daily Mom.

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