Merry Christmas, and our Gingerbread House

I hope you all had a great day yesterday and that you had fun with family and friends!

We had our annual family gathering earlier this year for our gingerbread house, and I'll show you some of what went on.

My brother decorated quite a few chocolate molds for inside and around the house. His attention to detail is amazing, isn't it!

As we did last year, we decorated the inside of the house so that when you peered inside the windows you can see some of the chocolates. Besides the "wooden" floor, we put up a string of Christmas lights, a wreath, and a chocolate lamb went next to the tree (not pictured).

This is what the house looked liked after all the walls were assembled, but before we finished the roof, the outline of the house (piped with frosting stars and lined with iridescent sugar pearls), and the board the house sits on.

And, voila! For the roof, I made various sizes of pizzelles using the pizzelle maker I received a while back. We then brushed on thin, melted candy coating that had dots of colors in it and sprinkled the tiles with white sanding sugar.

Our house wasn't complete, of course, without the nativity scene. Mom built the log barn using pretzel sticks, made Joseph, Mary, and baby Jesus, plus the lone shepherd. It's really pretty cool to see!

If you look inside the door you can see the Christmas tree. My brother was really proud of that rug, by the way.

We won! For the second consecutive year! We ran into some trouble at the beginning, but once we were past it we just kept going until we finished and brought it in.

Hope you enjoyed looking!