Gingerbread Shack For Sale. New Lower Price! Needs TLC.

Our advent activity the other day: Making a gigantic mess. Also, we decorated a gingerbread house.

I bought a gingerbread house kit at Michael's for $9. It "includes everything you need!" Everything except a good floor-scrubbing afterwards.

Not surprisingly, we had a few issues. First, I broke two of the wall pieces while trying to square them up, and had to "glue" them with frosting. Then I put the end walls on the insides of the corners instead of outside, which meant that the roof pieces didn't go on quite right.

So our gingerbread house was a bit leaky and needed a lot of caulk. Not unlike our actual house, come to think of it.

Next, I had some problems with the piping bag. I've never used a piping bag before, and you know what? It's more complicated than it looks. You're supposed to twist the top so the frosting doesn't come out the back end, but I guess I didn't do it tight enough, because that's exactly what happened. Next time I'll use a twist-tie or a rubber bad or something. And I couldn't get a lot of the frosting back into the bag once it squirted out, so we ended up short on frosting. I went looking for something else to put on the roof, and since we had no white frosting in the pantry, we ended up frosting the roof with marshmallow fluff instead. Not a good idea: Marshmallow fluff doesn't harden. In fact, it actually seemed to get more liquidy and less fluffy when we first put it on. As a result, it slowly slid down our peaked roof, taking all of our decorations with it. It did firm up eventually, but not before our gingerbread house started looking a little ... droopy. Oh well, I suppose if you don't look too closely, the drips off the eaves could resemble icicles. : )

But of course, Elsa loved decorating the house. She did the roof all by herself, and helped me with the doors and windows. I got bored with the decorating after one wall, but she sat there adding more decorations to the roof for a good half an hour while I cleaned up.

She kept saying as we decorated, "This is gonna be so yummy!" I said, "Well, I don't know—the main point of a gingerbread house is to have fun decorating it and then enjoy looking at it afterwards." I mean, I personally think gingerbread is disgusting, and the cheap candy included with the kit has no taste other than sugar. But of course she could not be convinced that it wasn't going to be the tastiest thing ever. I've been letting her pick off a few pieces of candy each day since we made it.

And here's one more of our advent activity results—I glued popsicle sticks together into a Christmas tree shape, which Elsa then painted green and decorated with Christmas stickers and glitter glue. It's now hanging from the cabinet in our family room.