A little friendly Christmas competition!

One of my favorite traditions that Ryan and I have at Christmas time is decorating a gingerbread house together every year! We started doing this a few years ago while we were dating and we always have so much fun doing it! Here's a picture of one of our houses from years ago:

So one thing I discovered about Ryan while we were dating is that he is incredibly competitive. Seriously. If i want Ryan to be involved in something, all I have to do is turn it into a competition or a game and BOOM... he'll be there with his game face on. So this year my family and I decided to turn the gingerbread house tradition into a competition! And just as I thought, Ryan took this competition very seriously. I mean, he even made out sketches of our house before we actually constructed it. This was no game to him. It was serious business.

We had four teams: me and Ryan, my sister and her husband, my triplet brothers, and my then my twin brothers and brother-in-law. We all bought the same gingerbread house kit and then were allowed to supplement the kit with our choice of two bags of candy or food. But ONLY two bags. So you had to be creative! After all the houses were complete, my nanny-the judge- decided on a winner! We had such a blast doing this. However, I will admit it was a little frustrating at times. And the competition did get heated. I mean, what's a competition without a little smack talk? Here were the finished products:

This is my triplet brother's house! Can you believe three 17 year old boys did this? They're incredible.

They used peanut brittle and those little green jelly dots as their extra two bags of candy/food. I was so impressed.

This is my sister and her husband's house. They created a wedding chapel, which I thought was incredible creative. They did have a little trouble keeping their roof on their gingerbread house. Turns out, my brothers were the only master-carpenters when it came to putting the houses together. But my sister's house still turned out adorable!

Notice all the little sour patch kids in the front? Those were the guests at the wedding. Notice the candy cane arch? That's where the bride and groom sour patch kids stood and got married! They even had bridesmaids and groomsmen! I thought it was such a cute idea!

I LOVED the back of their little chapel!

This is my twin brothers and my brother-in-laws house. Keep in mind that my twin brothers are ten, and my brother-in-law had no idea what he was doing. I think their house turned out really cute though!

They ran out of candy to decorate the front of the house because they ate it all as they were decorating. Typical boys. They even did a little sucking-up to the judge, in hopes of winning. (Notice Nanny's name was graffiti-ed on the back of the house!)

And this was our house!! We decided to make a log cabin out of pretzel sticks and the roof out of cinnamon toast crunch! Ryan even made a little front porch with the pretzels (I told you he got competitive). He wanted to make a rocking chair out of the pretzels to sit on the porch, but I decided that was a little too ambitious. We were really happy with the way it turned out, however, we did have trouble keeping the roof on our house too!

We tried to make the icing along the roof of the house look like dripping snow, but it didn't work out as well as we planned.

The only thing our house lacked was a little bit of landscaping in the front! We just ran out of time, so we had to stick with the snowy front yard.

The gingerbread house competition definitely was a family affair! My older sister, Audrey, didn't decorate one because she was taking care of her little boy, Jack... but she walked around and monitored everyone's progress. My mom and dad gave us some helpful tips and encouragement as they walked around and looked at the houses too! It was so fun!

So are you just dying to know the winner?! drumroll please........

THE BOYS HOUSE! I have to admit, theirs was pretty fantastic.

We'll get you next year, boys. Just you wait.