Christmas Traditions

Our family has many Christmas traditions.  On my mom's side of the family, each one of the sister's takes their turn and hosts Christmas as well as making an ornament for each member of our large family.  So, our Christmas tree is full of numerous homemade ornaments from years and years of Christmases. 

Since we closed on our house on December 15, we have always reserved that day as our "Family Day".  That night we have a special dinner with sparkling grape juice for the kids served in fancy glasses, and we usually decorate our gingerbread house that night.  Well, this year it got too late with obligations, homework, etc, so we had to wait until the weekend to make our Gingerbread Houses.  This year I bought a kit that had 5 buildings as part of a village.  I thought this was perfect since there were 5 of us, we could each make our own building.  Well, I was NOT happy with the kit as 2 of the buildings were broken, 1 repairable and one not.  Also, the frosting they included was 1-not nearly enough and 2-crappy.  So, I looked online and found an icing recipe, made up my own, cleaned out our candy shelf and we went to work.  Enjoy the photos below!