Decorating Gingerbread Sleighs 2011

It's that time of year again!  GINGERBREAD SLEIGHS!  This is one of our favorite family traditions!  And it just wouldn't be official if Jed and the kids didn't don candy warts and earrings for a picture!

Ben decorated his own gingerbread sleigh last year and this year, and he gets to pick one friend to deliver it to, all full of homemade goodies.
Eliza got to decorate her own Gingerbread House this year.

She squirted some frosting on her roof and put a few candies in it (with my encouragement) but the rest of the time she spent eating candies, watching us decorate, and... 

 Needless to say, she kept her frosting bag just for her and her gingerbread house.  :)  I kept telling her not to suck on her frosting bag because there are raw eggs in the frosting (raw whipped egg whites make it dry hard).  The next day we took one of our pretty decorated sleighs to our neighbor, and Jed just mentioned that although it's real gingerbread, the sleigh itself isn't necessarily that great to eat, and Eliza pipes up, "The frosting has rotten eggs in it!" We got a good laugh out of that one! haha!

 Sammy got to decorate a couple gingerbread men. At first he was putting candies in the frosting I piped for him, but then he decided he would rather eat them. :)  Here he is begging me to give him his candies back. I had moved them out of the way for the picture. Should have known that would not go over too well. :)

Posing with our finished sleighs!
The really cool designs are Jed's.  He always makes sweet scenes on his sleighs- snowboaring people, wrapped presents, elegant stars of Bethlehem, dripping icicles, or perfect evergreens with snow falling all around... After a while of struggling to decorate my sleighs with original ideas, I finally gave up and announced I was going to plagiarize all of his awesome designs.  And I did.  Sadly, they were not that great of copies. My presents were lumpy, my evergreens were lopsided, and my stars were bulky.  That's what I deserve for stealing his ideas. :)  ha!

Links to Gingerbread Sleigh Decorating over the years:

In 2007
In 2009
In 2010