Gingerbread House Decorating Party

This was my first time to host a gingerbread decorating party, so I'm sharing the things I learned along the way!  

Planning is key.

Use a hot glue gun and graham crackers.

Watch for unusual candy to buy.

Unusual things I looked for:
Heart shaped candy around Valentine's Day
Pastel candy at Eastertime
peppermint sticks
fruit slices
gumdrops
chocolate covered sunflower seeds
necco wafers
dots

Other unusual ideas:  sprinkles, cereal, necco wafers, vanilla wafers

Normal Candy Ideas:  m&ms, candy canes, hot tamales, mike & ike, starburst*, jolly ranchers, red and green candy, tootsie rolls, gumdrops, pastel mints, gum, jelly beans, red hots, caramels, licorice

*a fun tip with starburst, you can unwrap them, microwave for a few seconds and then roll them flat and cut shapes out of them.

Buy 8 inch round cake boards.

It looks nice and makes your life so much easier than trying to cut pieces of cardboard.  

A table cloth you can throw away is everything.

They are $1 at Dollar Tree and again, it makes life easier.  

Give yourself time to set up.

I didn't have a ton of time to set up.  It was a fun part for me, seeing all my planning and candy collecting come together.  It takes a while to open every candy package and to put them in containers and spread them out on the table.  I used several muffin tins.  I had saved some plastic ones that come with dinner rolls and they worked great.

Buy a few special decorations for the houses.

I came across some Christmas cake decorating decals at Michaels and they made each house really cute and elevated.  

Squeeze bottles work great.

Piping bags are a challenge to work with and especially for young kids.  I wasn't sure if the frosting would be too thick or get stuck, but we found it worked great.  The one hard part was getting the frosting into the squeeze bottle.  One big piping bag, for filling the frosting would probably be a good idea.

Make sure to take good pictures of every house as soon as it's done.

I read stories about people dropping their houses on the way to their cars.  Just have a plan that as soon as they're done, you'll take a picture.  I took a close up of each house, but I kind of wish I would have also taken one of each person holding their house.  Also in a perfect world, I would have a clean, well lit place to take the picture of each.

How cute would they look, standing in front of this for their picture!?

Ideal world - photograph each using a light box! #IYKYK

🏠😌😡💗💗💗💗💗

Play Christmas music, have a few snacks (including protein since everyone will be snacking on candy), have a batch of hot cocoa ready to go.

It's a party!  Even though everyone is pretty focused on their specific tasks, make sure everyone is having fun!  You could ask periodic Christmas trivia questions or do Christmas memory conversation starters.  You could draw names for door prizes.  

Try to enjoy it - it'll go by in a blink!