Gingerbread House of Epic Proportions

This Christmas my sister Tori and I decided while admiring all the gingerbread houses on display in Midway for a children's benefit, that we were going to make an epic gingerbread house this Christmas. We really wanted to make one of those Victorian style gingerbread houses that just leave people in awe. So we started with some pictures online and just started designing, and eventually it took shape. Though we decided that next year we will definitely plan ahead. 

I love this picture because it shows everyone in the family working on the gingerbread house. You can't see Eric because he's taking the picture, you only see my arm, and Aleksa is hidden, but it was a true family effort. I think we may have started a family tradition. In the past our gingerbread house attempts consisted of    of small cardboard milk cartons covered in 5 graham crackers, and eating more candy than was actually used for the house, I think we definitely took our gingerbread house making to a whole new level.

You can see the many, different sides of our gingerbread house, and you can see the lack of conformity. The problem was that even though my mom bought hoards of candy, we didn't have enough of any one thing, so each side ended having it's own theme. We think that next year (at Thanksgiving because my parents have Thanksgiving next year) we will make a village of houses that are about a third of this size and come prepared with our house design and candy decoration plan. It was a huge task to build it from cardboard, cover it in graham crackers, and decorate it. The whole project took us 2 days.