Christmas Party Planning > Christmas Party Themes

Gingerbread Party
Good old-fashioned fun for kids and adults alike!

The ‘Gingerbread Party’ promises a fun party night for families. Kids and adults all can be invited to this party and are sure to spend a lovely time.

Invitations

Create an invitation that looks like a gingerbread house. It can easily be done with dark brown cardstock. Pick up a few packages of stickers that look like candies from a craft store and decorate your gingerbread house invitations.

Another option is to make gingerbread men out of your brown cardstock or even real gingerbread and attach a small envelope with the party information to one of their hands. Then the gingerbread man can deliver the invite.

Or you could attach gingerbread house or man shaped cookies to a regular party invite since you are going to be having a lot of gingerbread baking going on anyways.

Ask everyone that you invite to bring candies that can be used to decorate gingerbread houses. You may want to give assignments so that you don't end up with a ton of the same thing.

Here are a few suggestions on items that are great for decorating gingerbread houses; pretzel sticks, graham crackers, chocolate bars, gum drops, ice cream cones, small candy canes, marshmallows, peppermint candies, chocolate kisses, baking chips, licorice and candy coated chocolate candies.

Decorations

Decorate the walk to the door with large plastic candy canes. Inside hang up lots of glittery lights, hang candy ornaments from anything you can find; the banister, ceiling even light fixtures.

For the tables, fill clear vases or bottles with candies and set them out on tables and other places as decorations. You will want to make sure you have plenty of table space for the activity, so set up extra tables if needed. For a festive look put red and green tablecloths on the tables.

Gingerbread Tree Centerpiece

A Gingerbread Tree centerpiece makes a fitting table decoration for this party. You can make one using gingerbread star shaped cookies in decreasing sizes to stack your tree and decorate with icing or simply use a pre-baked ‘Gingerbread Tree Kit’ to save time and have all the fun.

Planning Ahead

Your main job as the host is to provide pre-baked un-decorated gingerbread houses in different shapes and sizes for the guests to decorate. You need to do this in advance.

Browse through our article on gingerbread houses for ideas for making the bases. You can also print them out along with others on our website and other websites and keep them as a reference for all guests to get some ideas to decorate their houses.

Games and Activities

If you have a lot of guests divide them into smaller groups and give each group already baked gingerbread to make houses. You can also make gingerbread boys and girls for people to decorate. Open up the candies everyone brought, turn on some holiday music and have fun creating the gingerbread houses.
When the groups are done, each table will have a number of houses. Sprinkle caster sugar and other decorations between the houses to make the scene look like little gingerbread villages. Now, allow people to mingle and look at the different creations. You can offer prizes for the best decorated houses. Finally, offer hot cocoa, hot cider and sweet breads or cinnamon rolls.

This article first appeared in the 'Celebrating Christmas PDF Magazine' which is a FREE magazine that you can download and even print out.