I remember how much fun we had and how I began to fall in love with the idea of doing these kinds of things with the boys at home as part of their schooling.
For some reason we didn't do a Gingerbread Day last year, but I knew I wanted to have one this year. I planned it for the week after Christmas and invited my dad and his wife, my niece and nephew, and my sister to join us. I took advantage of the post-Christmas clearance sales to pick up our supplies, including a pre-made gingerbread house for us to decorate. I laughed when I saw two of my favorite blogger-moms post about their own gingerbread days! I'm thrilled to share this fun tradition with them.
So, on Thursday, everybody came over and we had a really fun day! We started by reading Jan Brett's "Gingerbread Baby" and then we helped each child assemble their own graham cracker gingerbread house. While the icing dried, we worked together to decorate the pre-made gingerbread house. (I loved Jessica's idea - on Shower of Roses - to use muffin pans to hold all of the decorations. It worked great!) Then the children got to decorate their graham cracker houses. After that, we had free play time and then lunch.
That morning, before everyone arrived, I had mixed a batch of gingerbread dough. After lunch, we rolled out the dough and cut and baked some big and small gingerbread man cookies. We then decorated those. We also did a little bit of crafting, decorating gingerbread cut-outs with glitter glue, sequins, pom poms, etc.
I was amazed at how calm and fun the whole day was. Thanks to my dad, I think my kitchen was actually CLEANER when the day was over. We all had a really good time, nobody ate too much candy, my house wasn't destroyed, and the children loved spending the day working and playing with their cousins. Special memories are made on days like this!
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