Decorating for Christmas with Gingerbread Houses

With today's economy woes everyone is facing, spending time with your family making gingerbread houses can be a great way to decorate your home for Christmas. Everyone has their own ideas on how a gingerbread house can be decorated. By the time the family is done decorating their own gingerbread house, you can have a village built in a weekend.

With that in mind, between now and the time to start decorating for Christmas, your family can sit down and decide how they want to decorate a gingerbread house for themselves. Not only that, once Halloween has passed baking supplies for Thanksgiving and Christmas will start going on sale if they haven't already in your area. Some of the ingredients for the gingerbread houses can be bought as early as today without going out-of-date before your gingerbread building weekend begins. This way you don't have to buy the bulk of items needed before starting this craft project.

Be sure to keep an eye out for coupons on some of the items needed for your gingerbread house recipes. Taking a look at the recipes listed with the free gingerbread house patterns in both articles, you can get an idea of how much of each ingredient you are going to need for them. Once you have your list of ingredients written down, look for coupons in your Sunday paper and online to help save money for making the gingerbread houses.

Get back into the gingerbread man theme and add a gingerbread house to the mix for decorating your home for Christmas. You can create your own gingerbread town with many of these free gingerbread house patterns.

Even though I had already written one article Free Gingerbread House Patterns, you can never have enough options for making a gingerbread house when decorating your home for Christmas. This time I have added one list from the previous article and two new ones for making a homemade gingerbread house.

Free Gingerbread House Patterns and Recipes

Home Sweet Gingerbread Home

This gingerbread house tutorial takes you through the items needed for starting your house to making the gingerbread pieces to baking and building.

Gingerbread House Patterns

This website gives you some ideas on how to decorate and build a gingerbread house. There are templates for making the outer walls and roof for the ginger bread house. The only link that didn't go to a gingerbread house pattern was the McCormick's link. The King Arthur Flour's Building a Gingerbread House link takes you to the pattern and provides a gingerbread recipe and instructions of rolling out the gingerbread. There are also tips for building a gingerbread house. If you don't want to make your gingerbread house from the patterns, there is a list of gingerbread kits at the bottom of the page.

Gingerbread House 101

You will find the basic information on gingerbread house build, decorating, and landscaping on this website. You will find recipes for basic gingerbread, non-edible royal icing, edible buttercream cement, ornaments and gift recipes. There are blueprints for five different styles of gingerbread houses and one for the dormer and chimney.