Happy Holidays! Let's Celebrate with Gingerbread!
The Gingerbread Christmas Playdatebox is a themed box of fun designed to get you and a child you love playing together. At Christmastime, we are especially passionate about our goal of helping grandparents and grandchildren create connections, regardless of distance.
This Playdate focuses on two values we think are important to pass on: Selflessness & Generosity
We’ve gathered several ideas for you to choose from, each based on the theme of gingerbread, or generosity and kindness. Just choose one book, an activity, and a question that is age-appropriate for your grandchild, gather your supplies, and start playing!
How To Create Your Own Playdatebox
Some Books We Love:
Start your Playdatebox by choosing one picture book your grandchild will love. Of course, the best way to do this is to choose a book that you love! This will be the anchor leg of your play date. When we play in-person, I make sure that we have more than one book to choose from. If you are playing remotely, I always recommend that the child has access to a full-size book, if possible. I like sending my long-distance grandchildren a physical copy in a Playdatebox I build and ship to them. Alternatively, I can arrange with their parents to check out a copy from their local library, or I find an online version to read as I share my screen in a videoconference.
Almost everything I put in a Playdatebox that I take when I visit grandchildren physically can also be used remotely. Watch for “How To Do This Remotely” hints if you are connecting long-distance.
Gingerbread Baby
By Jan Brett
Available as a board book (ages 2-6 years).
Watch Matti outsmart the sneaky gingerbread baby.
The Christmas Miracle of Jonathan Toomey
By Susan Wojciechowski, illustrated by P.J. Lynch
*also available on Readeo.com
Jonathan Toomey is the best woodcarver in the valley, but he is always alone and never smiles. But one early winter’s day, a widow and her young son approach him with a gentle request that leads to a joyful miracle. This haunting story teaches about how two kind strangers reach out to and serve a grieving craftsman by helping him remember the reason for the season. Their story of generosity and selflessness will make your holiday a bit brighter.
The Trees of the Dancing Goats
by Patricia Polacco (ages 5-10)
In the middle of her family’s preparation for the festival of lights, Trisha visits her closest neighbors, expecting to find them decorating their house for Christmas. Instead, they are all bedridden with scarlet fever! This beautiful cross-cultural holiday story is one of my favorites. You’ll learn how one small Jewish family saved Christmas for their entire small farming community. This is a true story based on the author’s childhood in Michigan.
The Carpenter’s Gift
by David Rubel, Illustrated by Jim LaMarche (ages 5-9)
A story of the first Rockefeller Center Christmas Tree and the kindness of strangers. During the Great Depression, a young boy and his father spend a day cutting Christmas trees to sell. They gift the largest one to the crew of men building a new skyscraper in New York City. In return, these strangers pay it forward with a kindness that serves the family who served them. In a twist on a fictional tale, you’ll learn the “true story” of how the wood from the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree is now re-purposed into lumber that is used to help build a home for a family in need.
Activity #1: Make Gingerbread or Edible Gingerbread Playdough
Gingerbread cookies are a terrific sensory experience for a child. When we make them, we take time to stop and smell each ingredient we add: molasses, ginger, cloves, nutmeg, and cinnamon.
If you don’t want to bake your cookies, leave the egg out and add a little extra water and you’ll have a wonderfully-scented play dough!
Activity #2: Gingerbread Baby Hide and Seek
In the book, Gingerbread Baby, the entire town has to chase down Matti’s escaped gingerbread baby. Cut out a gingerbread person using cardboard, felt, or craft foam and hide it around the house and take turns finding it.
How to Do This Remotely:
Your gingerbread baby can travel around with you all season. Take photos of him doing all kinds of interesting things with you — going to a concert, traveling in your suitcase, etc. and text your photos to your grandchild. Or, play hide and seek via video conference. Cover your video camera, hide your gingerbread baby within view of the camera, and then uncover it again.
Activity #3: Decorate a Gingerbread House or Gingerbread Cookies
It won’t matter whether you decorate a full-on gingerbread house from scratch, use a purchased kit, or just add some icing to an ugly sweater cookie. You can make a special day with a child you love. And best of all, you don’t have to be in the same room to decorate together!
How to Do This Remotely:
You’ll need supplies on both sides of your video call, but whether you are creating side-by-side or remotely, make sure everyone in the room has a supply of gingerbread, frosting, and colorful candies!
Take Note: Hints for Simplified Gingerbread House Decorating
1) ALWAYS Assemble your gingerbread houses in advance. There’s nothing more frustrating to a child than waiting while royal icing sets up, or having a house fall apart after the decorating starts. If you are using royal icing (including the icing that comes in a premade kit) start 4-5 hours ahead and pre-assemble all houses. If you need something faster, you can make an “edible” glue by melting granulated sugar carefully on the stove until it is liquid. This is a job for grownups only! If you don’t plan to eat your house later, a hot glue gun makes sticking house pieces together super simple.
2) You don’t have to use gingerbread! If you are assembling from scratch, graham crackers work fine for kid-sized gingerbread houses, and so do frosted pop-tarts.
3) Prepare pastry decorator bags of icing in advance. You can use a zip-top bag with a corner cut off in a pinch, but for little people, a pastry bag is so much easier to handle! It’s just worth the investment for a pastry bag and a piping tip. You can tie a rubber band around the neck of the bag to keep frosting from leaking out the top when little people are squeezing the bag. You can purchase pastry bags wherever you find cake-decorating supplies. I like to mix up several colors of icing and have several bags on hand.
4) Contain your assortment of small candies in mini bowls or ramekins. This makes them easier for little hands to manage. I set these out along with the assembled houses and the frosting bags so that there’s a station for each child.
5) Let children’s imaginations run wild. Older children especially, will get a kick out of creating interesting gingerbread features out of all kinds of edible supplies. Shredded wheat makes a snow-capped thatched roof. You can melt Jolly Ranchers in the oven to make stained glass. As a child, I loved it when my mother made a beautiful gingerbread house with stained glass candy windows and set a battery-operated light inside. Magical! I loved making windows out of fruit-striped gum.
6) The creative process works differently for each person. Allow messes. They can be cleaned up later.
You can mail a simple-to-assemble gingerbread house kit made out of craft foam and skip the frosting altogether! This one is available from Oriental Trading. You and a grandchild who lives far away can decorate them together as you talk to one another via videoconference. Last year I bought a set and we used them as a pre-dinner activity when we had our Christmas meal.
You’ll find an abundance of fun gingerbread house kits online and in your local department or grocery store. These take a lot of the fuss out of making a gingerbread house and they are especially fun for smaller children. You can put a kit together and decorate it in under an hour.
Values To Hand Down: Selflessness and Generosity
Nearly every precious and vivid childhood memory I have of Christmas is prefaced by some act of selflessness or generosity. One year, it was me and my brother hiding in the bushes after we anonymously delivered a warm Christmas dinner my mother had made for our recently-widowed church custodian.
Another year, sensing my loneliness for my old friends and my old neighborhood after we had moved to a new city, my mother gave me a music box that played “Edelweiss,” a favorite song I had sung as a solo in a children’s music group before we had moved. She knew that it would help me understand that she understood how much I was missing my past life. I still have it.
One snowy Christmas, my grandmother drove 500 miles in below-freezing winter weather. In her back seat were a dozen potted plants she carefully protected from freezing. I had expressed a desire to learn the secrets of her green thumb, so she brought me a start from each of her favorite houseplants.
Another precious memory is the year my 12-year-old son saved his lawn-mowing money and purchased a ring for me on eBay after I lost my wedding ring and hunted for days and days in vain.
The children’s books I love at Christmastime (and the ones I most often read to my own grandchildren) include stories of loss, lean times, sacrifice, and generosity. They resonate with me because of my Christian background. I believe these sacrifices of goodwill and generosity are representations of the sacrifices made by the Savior, Jesus Christ, whose birth this season celebrates. My faith tradition is that as we serve our families and our neighbors, giving out of our own abundance, we are emulating Him.
Your faith tradition likely includes this same element of valuing charitable kindness, but even if your grandchildren don’t identify with a particular religion, the values of generosity and selflessness are important to hand down. And Christmas is the perfect season to do it. You may choose to create some kind of tradition in your family that allows you to practice these values. Give to a homeless shelter, visit an aging neighbor, or donate to a favorite charity. As a grandparent, you might do something as simple as gifting your child a small sum of money and charging them with the responsibility of finding a way to multiply that sum and then use it to make life better for someone else.
Four years ago, my then 4-year-old granddaughter was helping me decorate a gingerbread house when she spontaneously wrapped her little arms around my neck and said, “Grandma, I love you so much!” That day represented my very first playdate ever. So for me, gingerbread has become a symbolic representation of what it felt like to be loved completely and to return that love wholeheartedly. I’m hoping that you and your grandchildren will be blessed to share that same kind of connection.
Connection Questions:
Can you remember a time when someone sacrificed something important in order to give a gift to you?
Each month, I include a “connection question” or two that you can ask one another. Sharing these “family stories” while you are making gingerbread or decorating gingerbread houses will help create bridges of connection between you and your grandchild. Take turns answering any of these questions, and when possible, record or write down the answers!
Some additional questions:
- What smell or fragrance most reminds you of the holiday season? What about a food that just tastes like Christmas to you?
- What Christmas present was the most memorable gift you ever received? Why?
- Tell me all about Christmas like when you were a child. How is it different now?
- Did you ever have a disappointing or difficult Christmas season? What happened?
Making Your Own Playdatebox
Download a printable version of all of the ideas from this Playdatebox here. If you are sending a physical box of supplies to your grandchild, it’s critical that you work together with the parents in advance so you can choose activities that will work best for their children. Working together with the parents to plan and carry out your playdates, you’ll be improving your relationship with them as well. If just the thought of decorating an entire gingerbread house raises your blood pressure (or theirs), look for easier alternatives:
- Decorate a single gingerbread cookie instead.
- Visit a local display of professionally-decorated gingerbread houses rather than making them at home.
- Decorate craft foam gingerbread houses or kits. Find these online.
For in-person fun, I just keep a box of Playdate supplies ready to go so that when I do visit (or they come to visit me) we are all set! Happy Playing!
-Grandma Nae
P.S. Special thanks to Grandma RaRa who helped create this box!
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