It’s a Dunsmore family tradition to make gingerbread constructions when Christmas rolls around. I’m not sure when we built the first house (1993?), but once we got the hang of it, we went to town. Over the years we’ve built gingerbread versions of Stonehenge, a Buddhist Temple, Alpine chalets, and even a backwoods cabin complete with outhouse. This year we strayed even further from tradition than usual and went for trains.

Thanks to ingenious design work by my brother-in-law Jack and my dad, we wound up with pretty convincing trains. Once the parts were glued together, we got out the candy and went to town.

We made two engines and a bunch of cars, including one oil tanker. It looks like they are held up by their wheels, but if you look closely at the cars, you can see how we did it – hidden feet.

Everyone got involved in the decorating and despite our best efforts, we still had bags of candy left over. No worries, though. We’ll use them in our next gingerbread extravaganza.