My Winter Gingerbread Village

Welcome!  Well, 2018 has come in with a bang!  I am sitting here at my computer watching out the window as a "blizzard" unfolds before my eyes.  The snow falling is lovely and so far, there are no heavy winds so, all is good!  Hopefully, the storm won't be as bad as they have forecasted.


Every year after Christmas I seem to need to ease out of the holidays.  I either have to do some kind of transitional decorating or I do a craft to ease into full-blown winter. This year, since most of my holiday decorations are still up (They will be coming down very soon. I promise.), I decided to go with a craft.  I came upon a clearance section last week while doing some after Christmas shopping and decided to purchase three gingerbread house kits, one large and two small.  The total cost of the three homes was $5.50.  Not bad for a fun craft!




Full disclosure:  The houses are very small but, they are perfect for me.  I didn't want a large village anyway.


 The smaller gingerbread house kit came with the above ingredients.  The larger kit came with more frosting and different candies.  The smaller kit, below, needed to be cut into sections since it had been baked in one solid piece.


The larger kit shown here needed no separating.  The pieces were very nicely shaped and without any imperfections.  I was pleasantly surprised by the quality of the kit, especially for such a good price.  At full price they would have been reasonable too!  I'll have to remember this next year.   


Because I did not expect anyone to actually eat the houses I decided to hot glue the houses together instead of using the frosting as the "glue" as is traditionally the way to do it.  As you will see later, I am in no way good at this craft, I simply thought I would enjoy it and wanted to give it a go :).


 This was one of the smallest houses put together~

And this was the larger home assembled.  You can see some of the hot glue showing.  I figured it would be covered up with frosting eventually so I didn't fret about the mess.


 Unfortunately, after being pretty diligent about taking photos through the assembling step, I got into the decorating mode and never took a photo during that whole process.  So, it appears I will have to show you the end results only.  To be honest, my fingers were so covered with frosting that picture taking was almost impossible!

Anyway, here is the end result; my winter gingerbread village.  The goal was to make the village look wintry but not Christmassy. That way I could keep it displayed during January.  I hope I achieved this.  There is no red in sight, except for one door knob :).


I can, however, highlight the different features of the village even if it is after the fact.  This was the roof of the larger gingerbread house.  That kit had come with these cute white and blue snowflakes.  Those colors are wintry and not exclusively relegated to Christmas :).  The little green gummy bear (included in the kit) you see here was added to the landscape in interject some color.


This is the roof to one of the smaller houses~

 The roof to the other small house~

 This is the back of one of the smaller houses.  It's not really finished but, I expected it would be up against a wall anyway so it didn't matter so much.  I like these wafer cookies I found at the grocery store.  I added the wafer cookies, Snowcaps, coconut and lifesavers to the candy that came with the kits.  The wafer cookies added extra texture and interest.  If I had allotted myself lots of time, figuring out all different kinds of candies and cookies to use would have been a blast!  As it was, I had to use what was readily available in the time I had to complete the project.


I found a brand new bag of animal crackers, a huge one, in the pantry and sifting through it I found this horse cookie.  I immediately had to use it somewhere in the scene.  I attached it to the front of the big house with frosting and just loved the look.


Later when I decided to make a split rail fence out of the wafer cookies, I had to empty the whole bag of animal crackers to find one more horse.  Evidently, the bag was supposed to be mostly safari animals and I guess I had been lucky to find any horses at all!  The bag did have lots of  mules, however (go figure!). Since mules can be found in the US, I thought it would be OK to use one here, as well.   It ended up that the split rail fence is my favorite part of the whole village scene.



I used Snowcaps to make the walkway and coconut to make more "snow".  Everything smells so yummy!

It is a shame that the village isn't going to be eaten, after all.


This is one of the smaller houses.  They were so small that they were very hard to decorate.  You had to have a very steady hand, which I obviously did not have.  My houses are pretty messy but, I still like them 
anyway :).


I tried to use the candies that came with the kits to add color wherever I could.  I made little "shrubs" out of the green ball candy.  The candies in the kit were limiting because I didn't want to use any Christmas colors.  This did not leave many to choose from.





As it has turned out, I should have saved this gingerbread house activity for today.  I've been housebound with the snowstorm and would have had lots of time to fuss and fret over every detail of the village.  I am sure it would have turned out much better.


However, I kind of like it just the way it is.  I like its imperfections.  Besides, I really should start taking down my Christmas decorations.  Maybe that's a good activity for me to finish off my snowbound day!!

I hope you are enjoying your day however you are spending it :)

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