Gingerbread House Throwdown, Year Three

Because of my work schedule and the timing of when the boys came home, we weren't able to do this until Christmas Eve - normally half the houses would have been eaten by then, but they looked pristine on Christmas morning, which was a first.  If you're new to the blog, we team up - Jeff/Sam and Max/me - to decorate a gingerbread house, and then decide on a winner.  In throwdowns One and Two, Max and I were the losers.  So this year, I started planning for a victory by "pinning" gingerbread decorating ideas on my Pinterest board.  Max and I reviewed them a couple of days before the challenge and promptly forgot most of them, dang it - we were ready to win this year, finally!

The decorations, minus the mini-marshmallows, which I'd planned on using on the base as snow.  Oops, forgot to get them out of the pantry.

As usual, Jeff and Sam immediately started cutting holes into their house...

While Max made me just watch as he thinks our loss last year was partially mostly to blame on my wonky roof decorating...

So fine, I helped myself to some candy while I waited!

Tasty!

See the cool chimney I built out of caramels?  Pretty cool, right?  Oh, and the boys, posing nicely for the camera as usual...

Sigh...

 I thought this shot and the one below were funny, just because I have no idea what we all were looking at.

I mean, really - what WERE we looking at???

The WINNERS!!!  Max and I declared ourselves the winners by default, since the other team (aka The Losers) used a non-candy decoration on their house - a Lego Santa.  Nope!  Invalid item.  We win!!!

Invalid Santa - I allowed the foil since it had been wrapped around chocolate.

 

 Winning house on the left, losing one on the right.

Side view - ours would have really looked cool had we remembered the "snow" on the ground!

Aptly named losing house - but they didn't know HOW bad Santa was going to be to them when they decorated it!

 I was pretty happy with the caramel chimney!

 And so was Sam...