Guest – Stacy McGuigan
How easy is it to create your own gingerbread houses?
Everyone loves the holidays. They’re a wonderful way to pass family traditions from one generation to the next. When we add holiday extras to a busy schedule, we can end up so exhausted we don’t enjoy ourselves. That’s why we’re hosting experts to share 24 holiday tips. We want to help you re-balance how you spend your time, so that you can relax and enjoy your favorite holiday traditions like … decorating gingerbread houses.
Favorite Holiday Activity
For Stacy and her family, decorating gingerbread houses is a major event. First they decorate individual houses and take photos. Each house gets uploaded to Facebook and the winner of the gingerbread house competition is the person who gets the most likes. Who would have imagined this a few years ago. In fact I really like the blending of new (Facebook) with old fashion face time across the kitchen table.
3 Tips: Creating Some Competition Around Gingerbread Houses
Creativity is Stacy's middle name. She's an event planner (StacyLMcGuigan.com), helping businesses with all sorts of events from grand openings and product launches, to employee appreciation and holiday celebrations. Stacy brings a unique approach to all her events, like turning ordinary gingerbread houses into a friendly competition and recognizing a local non-profit in most of her events, as a way of helping businesses connect with their local community and give back.
Here then are Stacy's creative ideas for decorating gingerbread houses in ways you'll never forget.
- Focus on decorating the houses which is lots of fun, using graham crackers instead of baking all the parts (truly a lot of work). Add excitement with some type of family competition … and maybe a prize for the person who's house weighs the most (Stacy and I laughed about our youngest sons who pile on the candy).
- Use gingerbread houses for a lunchtime team building activity, in lieu of an evening holiday affair (employees will thank you). Let employees cast secret ballots to pick a winner who might earn a day off or the president's parking spot for a week.
- With bigger companies, have employees form teams and adopt a non-profit in the area. Invite representatives from the non-profit to join in decorating the gingerbread houses and of course, voting makes it more fun. Here the winner's non-profit can win gift certificates of varying amounts based on company size.
If you’d like to listen to Stacy and I talking about gingerbread houses, click to listen to the recording …
Most Important Holiday Goal
Stacy believes the most important part of the holidays is spending time with your family, and letting go of everything else so you can enjoy the moment. She also knows it's important to give to others.
For more holiday tips, click here …
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