When Shannon told me that she wanted to do something “festive,” wheels were turning in my mind. Christmas music, tree decorating, hot cocoa, wrapping presents, baking cookies, ugly sweaters, decorating gingerbread men/houses, the list goes on! Of course, we didn’t have time to do all of that (it was a Sunday, after all!) so we did what we could! We spent the day/evening doing 100% Christmas “things” and it felt wonderful.

We naturally started with a yummy festive, handcrafted cocktail.  I’ve been on a spiced/apple cider kick, so I rigidly insisted that we include that in whatever we make.

For being totally experimental, we were pretty proud of ourselves for our creation! And is anyone surprised that we included a pretty substantial amount of champagne in this tasty treat?

If you remember from Weekend Recap, a couple of girlfriends and I assembled a gingerbread house last weekend, as tradition dictated. That obviously did not fill my fix, since I found myself itching for more gingerbread decorating! But I don’t know about you, but whenever I buy the store-bought decorating kits, I’m always left with this weird ambivalence about actually eating the completed gingerbread house. I’m just not sure how much I trust its true “edibility.”  So we sought to make our own, 100% edible, 100% fresh gingerbread MEN and decorate them! Since we couldn’t create this recipe like we did with our yummy cocktail, we relied on the Food Network for this one (we replaced the butter with applesauce :))!

{Cocktail napkins sold out, similar here | Table Runner}

We used simply sparkly red, store-bought tubed icing for the clothes, mini chocolate chips for the eyes and buttons, and m & m’s for some miscellaneous decorations. You can also use any other candy, melted chocolate, and even fruit roll ups and such for clothes and other decorations!

Moral of the story: Tis the season to get creative!