The house that Royal icing built...

Last year my aunt gave the kids a gingerbread house kit. We had lots of fun gluing candy and decorating the house. I had decided that we were going to do it again this year but had not gotten around to buying a kit yet when I noticed in our church bulletin that they were hosting a gingerbread house decorating workshop. I signed us up and off we went!

There were three sizes of houses to choose from. We opted for the smaller one since the kids are younger and we knew their attention spans would be short. We picked out our house...

And then we got to choose 6 bags of candy from this table...

There was every imaginable decorating candy available. There were gum drops, Mike and Ike's, Chicklets, peppermints, Necco wafers (which my husband reminded me several times stood for New England Candy Company),gum balls, M&Ms, Tootsie Rolls and Reese's cups.

There were also pretzels in multiple shapes and sizes, shredded wheat cereal and Wheat Thins. I could go on and on. Clearly, the people running this workshop had built a gingerbread house or two.

We paid for our little house and got our big bag of Royal icing and we started working...

And working...
And working...

Until our little house looked like this...

The kids had fun and when we left they had a little sugar buzz from sampling the roof "shingles" and the "bushes". I had fun because I was able to relax and let them make a mess because I didn't have to clean it up! And I think Dan had fun because he got to "build" something. (I am using the term "build" loosely because he was really decorating the house instead of building it but shhhhhhhhhhh we aren't going to tell him that!)

But the best part of the afternoon...we had fun as a family! We will definitely be doing this again next year!

And now for more pictures of our little house. Isn't it cute?