It’s Christmas time and not at all too early to make a fanciful and happy candy decorated gingerbread house to decorate your home or table for the holidays! It’s truly a fun tradition to begin even if you never made gingerbread houses when you were growing up…please pin pin pin to share the magic with your friends on Pinterest so everyone can savor the holiday inspiration!

My own gingerbread houses were rarely pretty enough to post on the blog, but the smells of gingerbread baking, the fun of watching my children glue on their Halloween candy (the leftover candy frozen just for this Christmas craft), and the festive cheer gingerbread houses bring to decor outweigh the mess and lopsided roof lines. You can buy gingerbread house kits online or at the grocery store, skip the gingerbread and use graham crackers, or just decorate cardboard or a milk carton with candy. This year, I will be making a variety of gingerbread houses and will share them with you soon.

Ready for your Christmas Crafty Candy House inspiration, hints, and ideas?

Best Gingerbread House Ideas

1.

Rock Candy Trees

No matter what the size of your gingerbread house, rock candy sticks work awesomely for trees since they glisten and look like magical psychedelic quartzy Christmas evergreens. (Also notice how effective a monochromatic color scheme works: in this case, slightly varying shades of pink boost the romance factor…sigh!).

Best Gingerbread Houses: Christmas Craft InspirationAnother secret weapon for gingerbread house builders in the know? Old fashioned stripey candy sticks.

2.

Gumdrop Gabled Roof

Gumdrops are your best friend as a gingerbread house builder since they are easily sculpted into varying shapes, cut open to reveal sticky insides that can be pressed into place, beautiful on their own with their sugary frosted snow exteriors, and perfect for massing on a rooftop as magical, balloon-like roof tiles.

Isn’t the tall gingerbread house below reminiscent of a Paris apartment building!?!

3.

Heart Shaped Candy

Is it any wonder that a heart shaped anything pulls at our heartstrings? These Swedish Fish Hearts and Heart-shaped lollipops are yummy lovely, and if you can find heart shaped chocolates…hurray! If you cannot, think about forming your own hearts from gumdrops or cutting heartshapes from fruit rollups or fruit leathers. The house below is also enhanced with sugary gummy worms suggestive of a frosty winter.

Best Gingerbread House Ideas: Finla Noronha

4.

Nontraditional Christmas Color Palette

The beautiful gingerbread house below ignores red and green for the most part in honor of turquoise blue which reads happy chic when paired with bright pink and lavender. Go ahead and decorate your gingerbread candy house with your favorite color combinations, designfreaks, and definitely don’t feel limited by the candy available to you on the shelves…so long as you won’t be eating the house, paint the candy as you wish!

5.

Topiary Trees

In the gingerbread house below, topiary trees have been formed with pink lollipops, brown sugar (I think), and thimble-sized caps or plastic toys, but you can easily substitute gumdrops for the base by molding them to your taste.

6.

Ice Cream Cones

Sugar cones work wonderfully turned upside down for trees, but you can also incorporate candy ice cream cones as you see below. Even plain old ice cream cones work great (you may have to cut down the size) for a chimney or planter pot outside the gingerbread house.

7.

Old Fashioned Lollipops

Old fashioned swirly whirly vividly striped lollipops and suckers look so at home with homemade gingerbread houses and add to the nostalgia and romance so do try to find one or ten to enhance your gingerbread home’s landscape. These turquoise blueberry beauties may inspire you! How to make them stand in place? Styrofoam will work for a base, and in some cases, gumdrops!

8.

Repetitive Rounds

The beautiful gingerbread house below incorporates round wafers which soften the home’s overall design and presentation. Even the royal icing is piped in lacy, delicate patterns as opposed to strong straight lines.

Need a pretty scalloped pedestal for your candylicious creation?

9.

Simple Cupcake Chimney Smoke

Isn’t this sweet white cupcake adorned with a single red candy perfect for simulating chimney smoke from a candy cane chimney? Notice too how the vanilla wafer cookies as roof tiles are not perfectly placed in uniformly straight lines but rather are staggered artfully to suggest an aged and interesting rooftop. (Pssst…need lemondrops for house landscaping like below?)

10.

Sub Chocolate for Gingerbread

Your magical Christmas Candy House need not be made of gingerbread or any cookies at all should you choose to build walls of chocolate. You’ll want to adhere the chocolate to a cardboard base so the weight of your adornments do not collapse, an I predict this is one house that will be nibbled on throughout the season. How fun to research candy bars and undress them to reveal their shiplap, board and batten, and log cabin architectural textures.

11.

Think Sugar Wafery Pixelated 1980’s

Why not go retro? This neon themed NO-BAKE gingerbread house below, made of sugar wafer cookies, is packed with smart design ideas beginning with its 1980s My Pretty Pony palette. The dotted roof is perfectly decked with dizzying stripes suggestive of pixels, early digital technology, and video arcade wonder.

12.

Simple Skittles Beautiful

Maybe you will opt for happy hued Skittles, a few gumballs, red hots, and peppermints for your gingerbread house design which can be completed in just a short amount of time…so simple lovely.

13.

Mini is Merry

This wee little gingerbread house looks adorable with its vivid and unexpected color palette and crisper look with royal icing only on the roof.

14.

Look to Frank Lloyd Wright

Who says you have to stick to a gabled roofline for your gingerbread house? Go Midcentury Modern with a flat roof and minimal embellishments for a creative spin on holiday house splendor.

15.

Open the Door

If you plan ahead in your gingerbread making, you can cut an arched door and position it to be open like the house below which adds to the warm hospitable flavor of the whole design.

16.

Add a Front Porch

Not that it’s an easy task! But should you decide your gingerbread house is worthy of front porch decor, go ahead and place your house on a base that has been constructed to accommodate a porch with wee built-in benches…my favorite part of this more-is-more candy house.

17.

Fantasy Fairytale Folly

To create a tower or turret like the wondrous candy house below, you could incorporate a simple plastic kitchen funnel (with its base snipped off) for the roof atop a cylinder which only appears to be gingerbread. The addition of bright candy decorations and little fairy lights inside is pure magic.

18.

Dotted Door

There’s something very 70’s kitsch and gnome-like nutty about this cheery polka dot studded door on this gingerbread house with minimal royal icing.

19.

Candy Cane Hearts

Candy canes are easily found in all sorts of bright cherry colors and can be configured to suggest a happy heart…and aren’t the sugary fruit slices appetizing?

20.

Monochrome Masterpiece

If red is your favorite hue with which to deck the halls, have at it. The addition of the fondant Noel sign is genius…by the way, did you know you can buy pre-made fondant which is perfect for gingerbread house decorating?

21.

Stick to Gum

Don’t forget the geometric lovely and sweet scale of sticks of chewing gum to construct your gingerbread houses. The chocolate bar candy house below is also illustrative of the power of limiting yourself to old fashioned candy only for a truly vintage-inspired gingerbread or candy house.

22.

Make it a Party

Doesn’t the beyond lovely tablescape below take your breath away and perhaps make you yearn to host a gingerbread house making party (which would float the boat of every girl or grandma)? Gold dotted gift wrap or kraft paper, chevron gift wrapped boards, plastic paint palettes to house candies (just 50 cents per pallette and free shipping!)and partially constructed gingerbread houses await the creativity and imaginations of the lucky party gues

Happy creating, friends, and I hope these gingerbread house making ideas inspire you to get your Christmas crafty craftsmanship ON to celebrate this fleeting season of hope, joy, and wonder. Pin this banner below to save for later and share with friends on Pinterest!

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Peace to you right where you are.

-michele

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