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There’s nothing quite like building a gingerbread house with your kids at Christmas time.
It’s fun, it’s sweet, and it can even be educational if you want it to be :)
But what if building that one gingerbread house just wasn’t enough? What if your child happens to be allergic to the ingredients in the candy? What if you’d just rather avoid the inevitable sugar rush and crash this year? :)
Well, you just make one out of cardboard!
Although we’ve tried to make a few in the past, gingerbread houses just don’t do very well in our house.
We have so many allergies that trying to find things to put on it that won’t make anyone sick becomes a huge chore.
So this year, we decided to try something a little bit different and it turned out to be an even bigger hit than the actual gingerbread houses have ever been.
This project was really meant to be a creative one. I wanted Nicholas to take the creative reins on this one and create something that was all his own. Something that wasn’t necessarily a “craft” but a “creation, if that makes sense :)
I went through our art supplies and pulled out anything that I thought Nicholas might want to use on his “gingerbread” house and pulled out some cardboard boxes that we have been meaning to get rid of.
To create the house, we simply cut out the wall and roof shapes from the cardboard boxes and hot glued them together. Finally, we glued the whole thing onto another piece of cardboard so that we would have a base to carry it around by.
Once our house was complete, I let him take over.
To get us started we took a look at some pictures of gingerbread houses for a little creative inspiration and then set out to make one of our own.
We included everything from crayons and paint, to buttons and pom poms but again, if you want to make one of your own, you could easily use just about anything :) Construction paper, sequins, tissue paper, glitter, whatever you want!
As he finished up, he decided that it just wouldn’t be complete without a Christmas tree so we cut out a tree shape from a little bit of craft foam and gave it a pom pom star.
Although it doesn’t look exactly like a gingerbread house, I have to say that this one was a lot more fun (and less messier) to make than the original and is something we’ll definitely be making again!
