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Make These Charming Gingerbread Houses from Paper Bags

December 16, 2025 by Sarah White Leave a Comment

One holiday tradition that I still do with my teenage daughter, even though we’ve never had a lot of holiday traditions, is decorating a gingerbread house. We use a kit rather than making gingerbread from scratch, and sometimes have a friend over to decorate with us. It’s always a lot of fun and then we keep the house on display for a few weeks as part of our holiday decor. 

If you want to do gingerbread houses without the mess, or you’re looking for a holiday classroom craft that doesn’t involve food, these gingerbread houses made from paper bags are a great option. 

This comes from The Best Ideas for Kids, and the post includes printables (free when you enter your email) that kids can color, cut out and add to the bag to make a gingerbread house all their own. 

Of course you could also start kids off with basic shapes like circles, squares and rectangles and have them draw their own windows, doors and roofs if you want. 

The printables also include things like giant lollipops and candy canes as well as smaller candies and Christmas trees that can be used to decorate the houses. There are three options for windows, doors and roof lines that you can mix up to make a bunch of different houses. 

This would be a fun activity to do in the classroom and see how different kids decorate their gingerbread houses (and they’re a great decoration for the classroom, too). Or you can make them at home and use them for decoration on the holiday table or elsewhere. 

Head to The Best Ideas for Kids to grab the printables and make this easy holiday craft for kids today.

Do you like to decorate gingerbread houses or is this paper version more your speed? I’d love to hear your thoughts!

[Photo: The Best Ideas for Kids] Check out the kids craft section on Craftbits.com

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Have you read?

Book Review: Once in a Blue Moon

Kids all seem to go through a phase of loving trivia, and if you’ve got kids who want to know about the tallest, biggest and weirdest things in nature, they’ll enjoy the book Once in a Blue Moon by Emily Hawkins. 

The book explores wonders of astronomy, meteorology, big trees, weird animals, volcanoes and more to show off the rarest events and phenomena in the natural world. 

Kids ages 7-10 will learn about the lake (Lake Hillier, on an island off Australia) that has water that’s bubblegum pink, the world’s deepst came (Veryovkina Cave in the country of Georgia) and the world’s biggest tree, a banyan in southeast India with a canopy that covers more than five acres!

Readers will learn what a blue moon is, how supernovas happen and about Haley’s comet and solar eclipses, among other space-related phenomena. Closer to home they’ll learn about stinky flowers, bleeding trees, glowing fungi and pizzly bears. 

There’s content about times when it’s rained frogs (and when frogs have exploded en masse), when snow made giant snowballs all by itself and how clouds stack on themselves like pancakes. The book also explores ball lightning, sun dogs, St. Elmo’s fire and more. 

I love books like this and I know kids do, too. There’s so much weird and wonderful about our world and even as adults we don’t know about all of these things. I found it fun to learn, for example, that there’s a volcano on the island of Java that not only sends out blue flames from vents near its crater, it’s also home to an acidic lake. 

Illustrations by Vlad Stankovic illuminate these weird natural wonders and are sure to get kids interested in learning more about some of these remarkable animals, plants, rock formations and more. 

About the book: 80 pages, hardcover. Published 2026 by Wide Eyed Editions. Suggested retail price $30.

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