How to Make a Gingerbread House

There are plenty of gingerbread house kits out right now—many of them on sale at places like Michael’s, Walgreens, or Hobby Lobby—but you don’t need a kit to create a charming (and delicious) culinary casa. In fact, you can probably make it with most of the snack foods you keep around in your home year-round. There are many ways to make a gingerbread house, but there’s one simple way that we’ve used with our preschooler since she was a toddler.

To make a gingerbread house, you’ll need something to form the house’s shape. Small juice and milk boxes work well. An animal crackers box will do the trick if you’re wanting a longer house, and for larger houses, try empty boxes of graham crackers or greeting cards.

To decorate, you’ll need graham crackers or anything else you’d like to use as siding, some kind of adhesive (we like using vanilla icing), and whatever you’d like to decorate your house with. The ideas for decorations are limitless! We’ve used everything from fruit snacks to candy canes, dum dums to M&Ms, gum drops to peppermints and more. Use your imagination for what you’ve got on hand, or take a special trip to let your kids each pick out one variety of special bright candy to use.

To begin building your house, you might want to anchor it down first by dabbing a bit of your adhesive to the bottom of your box or other shape retainer and place it flat on a paper plate, flat empty box, or other surface. We like to use those long, flat boxes you can get canned goods in so we can add a pathway and a bit of background when we’re finished.

Next, spread your adhesive all over the box and place your siding material all over it, taking care to shape it any way you like. Then, you can decorate! You could use the adhesive for each individual decoration, or spread it on the area to place the decorations on the house, or even cover the house in adhesive for a snowy effect, adding decorations as you go along.

Once you have one gingerbread house, you might even want to make a whole village. Try making Santa’s workshop and his reindeer barn. Maybe you could even make his sleigh out of a small box. Alternatively, try making something different—like a gingerbread skyscraper (maybe a Little Debbie cake box as your base?) or even a car.