Gingerbread Houses

Yesterday at church Sister Christofferson invited us bring our kiddos over to her house to see the gingerbread houses she made this year.  This one has a super festive smell with the cinnamon gum all over the roof - I love holiday aromas!

Sometimes their schedule is too busy to make it happen so she might skip a year here and there, but almost every year she makes gingerbread houses around Christmas time.  Usually she donates them to the Festival of Trees for Primary Children's Hospital or toward some other charitable cause. This year instead of making one large one, she's made/making 4 small ones for Christmas for her kids.

This one below is a replica of the actual home of one of her kids, if you look at the bottom left picture of the photographs on that paper to the right of the gingerbread house (she said the roof was super tricky on this one):

That one above she is going to very carefully package and reinforce and then mail to Arkansas - sending it off with a "good luck" prayer hoping it arrives in one piece! (Her first time mailing a gingerbread house...) Pretty impressive how much work goes into these - all the planning and measuring left us in awe, it's like a real architect blue print for a home, just on a smaller scale and with no plumbing, just a little electrical work - each of the butterscotch glass windows has an individual light put up to it on a strong wire - those are put up first after much planning and then the house is built around it.  Here she is explaining some of the details to us on the last house she's doing:

Pretty amazing talent, and what a fun tradition!  It's a special treat for our family to be invited to go see her houses each year (thank you!)