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Armed with more candy than you've even seen in person before, we created five gorgeous gingerbread houses: Candy Cane, Emerald City, Stripes + Lights, Color Blocked Craziness and Gold Rush.

How to make the best gingerbread house ever...

First thing’s first: get yourself a gingerbread house and mix up a batch of royal icing.

Then, it’s time for CANDY. Seriously.

Talk about a sugar rush.

Now, let’s start tricking out these houses!

Check out these creative gingerbread house ideas!

CANDY CANE Gingerbread House

Grab a Dylan’s Candy Bar Signature Holiday Paint Can ($30; Alt: Down Under Delight Paint Can, $17), as well as gumdrops, peppermints and candy canes.

You’re going to need a LOT of royal icing to stick on all the little candies! Make sure you’ve got two piping bags per house, just in case. We created a scalloped roof complete with red polka dots. Candy canes flank the door, welcoming you in, and we’re particularly in love with the sour gummy hedges in the front.

Add your finishing touches.

Voila!

So obsessed with this roof.

EMERALD CITY GingerBread House

For this house, you'll need a Mini Bin Filled with Mini Gumballs ($16; Alt: Sour Gumballs Bulk Bag, $6) and then you can pull out all of the green goodies.

The roof of your gingerbread house is definitely the best canvas for creativity. We created polka dot and squiggly stripes on this green roof. And sour gummy shutters? Yes please.

How fun are those fish at the top of the door? Sort of remind us of Eureeka’s castle.

STRIPES + LIGHTS GingerBread House

Dylan’s Candy Bar Wizard of Oz “Over the Rainbow” Paint Can ($16; Alt: Dylan's Candy Bar Rainbow Sour Belts Paint Can, $17) to create our striped roof.

Cut up gummy stripes to be the same length as your roof. Use royal icing to attach. Create icing windows and adorn with rainbow shutters.

Then use royal icing to create a string for your “lights” to hang on.

We couldn’t resist creating a few Christmasy hedges in the front of the house, complete with bright pink lights on top.

It almost looks too good to eat.

These gingerbread house designs are creative and so simple!

COLOR BLOCKED Gingerbread House

Just pick out some Dylan’s Candy Bar Tackle Box ($24; Alt: Dylan's Candy Bar Classic Christmas Tackle Box, $28), Dylan’s Candy Bar Everything Under the Sun Paint Can($17) and Dylan’s Candy Bar Whirly Pops ($3.75 each) to make this house.

We started with a criss-cross roof and embellished with floral candies.

Then, it’s time to add color everywhere you possibly can.

One fish, two fish, blue fish, blue fish!

GOLD RUSH Gingerbread House

Finally, we’re bringing the gold rush back with this minimalist design. The gingerbread dudes from Dylan’s Signature Holiday Paint Can ($17; Alt: Dylan's Candy Bar Candy Land Mix Bulk Bag, $9) are what really take this sleek look to the next level.

First cover the roof with icing, then add in gold stars. Use white chocolate-covered pretzels on the front of the house, and make sure to make dripping icicles out of your icing.

To finish it off, add snow piles around the house to give it a truly wintery vibe.

Done and done. And complete with a gummy gingerbread dude welcoming you in. Go ahead and pop a kiss off the top — we won’t tell.

And there you have it. Five ways to decorate the best gingerbread house ever.

What You'll Need

• 2 skeins of super chunky yarn
• Scissors

Instructions

1. Hold both ends of the yarn in your hand and measure out seven “elbow” lengths of yarn. At the seventh “elbow” mark, make a slip knot and place it around your right arm just below your elbow.

2. Create a loop with the tail and hold the top of the loop with your right hand.

3. Put your left arm through the loop and grab the working yarn.

4. Put the new loop on your right arm. Tighten by pulling the working yarn. Cast on 24 stitches.

5. To start the next row of stitches, you will hold the working yarn in your right hand, pull off your last stitch, and insert your left hand through the new loop.

6. Keep repeating for all 22 stitches until your knitting is on your left arm.

7. To create the next row you will hold the working yarn with your left hand, pull the last loop off of your arm, and insert your right arm through the new loop. You will want to create 8 rows. The knitting should end on your left arm.

8. To bind off your scarf you will need to knit two stitches on your right arm. Then pull the first stitch over the second stitch. Knit one more stitch from the left, and then pull the first stitch on the right over the second stitch on the left. For the last stitch, pull the loop off your arm, snip the end, and pull through so you end up with a second tail.

9. Time to stitch the scarf together into a circle. Meet the two ends together and, using your two tails, weave the sides together as if you were lacing a shoe. Secure by tying a knot where the ends meet.

Arm Knitting isn’t the easiest thing. Believe me, you can get really tangled up in the strings, especially when you’re working with multiple skeins. We suggest sticking to two skeins when you’re starting your arm knitting adventures. Once again, I suggest you scroll back up and go through the images multiple times. The stitches will seem awkward at first, but with practice it will “click” and you’ll be creating rows of stitches in no time at all!

To begin your knitting adventure you are going to want to hold both ends of the skeins in one hand and measure out seven “elbow” lengths of yarn.

At the seventh “elbow” length mark you will want to create a basic slip knot. To do this you create a loop by crossing the two strands over one another. Grab and pull the back strand through the loop. This will give you a loop with a knot! Slide it onto your right arm.

Time to complete your first stitch! The first row of stitches are referred to as “Casting on.” To cast these stitches onto your arm you’re going to make a loop with the tail end of your yarn and hold it in your right hand.

Weave your left hand through the loop and grab the working yarn.

Pull the working yarn through the loop.

Slide the new loop onto your right arm.

To tighten your stitches, pull the tail and working ends of the yarn. You want the stitches to be tight on your arm, but not so tight they can’t move.

You will need to cast on between 22-24 stitches. I’m not going to lie, I watched many tutorials over and over before I was comfortable creating stitches. I scrolled back through the tutorial every time I was casting on a new stitch. When you’re ready, move onto the left arm!

We will now only be using the working yarn (yarn attached to the skeins). We’ll work with the tail again later.

Hold the working yarn with your right hand and slip the last stitch over your hand while pulling the working yarn through. This will create a loop.

The first stitch of the second row! Slip it onto your left arm.

You will want to pull the end of the working yarn to tighten these stitches.

Second row of stitches done! They should all be on your left arm and your right arm should be free.

Now move back to your right arm. Hold the working yarn with your left hand and slip the last stitch over your hand and slip the knew loop onto your right arm. Scroll back through the tutorial to master the stitches of arm knitting!

You will want to create eight rows of stitches. They will end up on your left arm.

Time to “cast off.” It was nice having a warm cozy piece becoming one with my arm but I wasn’t ready for the commitment forever. To start casting off, you will need to create two stitches onto your right arm.

Grab the first stitch on your right arm and pull it over the second stitch and off of your hand.

You will now just have one stitch remaining on your right hand. Next you will need to create a new stitch on your right hand (by pulling the working yarn through the stitch on your left hand). Repeat the process above. Slip the first stitch on your right arm over the second stitch, leaving one stitch behind. You will follow this pattern until you have reached the end of your 24 stitches.

Can you believe it? You’re all done! For your last stitch you’re going to snip the working yarn and pull it all the way through to create a knot. When snipping the yarn, leave a two-foot-long tail.

Can you believe you made that with just your arm?! We can’t! Now I know we’ve said we're hooked on crafts, but arm knitting is in a whole other ballpark. We are OBSESSED!

Using the long tail you cut from the working yarn, you will tie the two ends of the scarf together to make a cowl scarf! Weave them through the rows of stitches as if you are lacing a shoe lace. There is no science to this, just weave them together. Tie the end in a knot with the tail end of the yarn from the beginning steps. Luckily this yarn is very fluffy and forgiving. It is impossible to see mistakes.

So fuzzy and warm. This is definitely a winter staple.

Try making more scarves with different types of yarn. We still used two skeins but this yarn was less fuzzy and created a less dense scarf.

Like we said, this is a winter MUST!

Have you ever tried arm knitting, or are you still trying to figure out how to knit a scarf? Be sure to subscribe to our newsletter for more DIYs!

"I feel so fortunate that I got to work with all of them in one front," Melissa Barrera says of director Caroline Lindy and costars Kayla Foster and Meghann Fahy a few days after the premiere. "They're so talented and so generous and so lovely and it just kind of felt like working with friends." Despite the fact the group already knew each other, Melissa was welcomed with open arms. "It was such a safe space, you know, it was so safe and unjudgmental and truly collaborative and it was all about propping each other up all the time."

"Even behind the scenes, there were a lot of women too," she says before exclaiming, "Women in film! It's great because also, it's about female rage. It's a story about female rage. So it makes sense that it would be women that have been through this, that understand what it's like, that know what Laura is going through to tell this story."

I loved seeing Melissa reunite with the cast and crew at the premiere, but this isn't the first time she's formed a bond with a costar. After the release of Scream 6 in 2023, videos of Melissa and her onscreen sister Jenna Ortega laughing during the press tour went viral — and considering how much the moment reminded me of my relationship with my own sister, I couldn't pass up the opportunity to ask about it.

"I was so sick during the whole press," she says. "We were laughing because I would start choking on my cough, so it was hilarious — or I would start laughing and it would make me cough and then I couldn't stop. So yeah, we were laughing a lot during that press run because I was sick as a dog."

But a relationship with Jenna, and laughing, weren't the only things Melissa went viral for last year. After posting about the Palestinian and Israeli conflict, Melissa Barrera was fired from Scream. Jenna Ortega left the franchise a few days later, citing scheduling conflicts with Wednesday season 2. Earlier this year at the Sundance Film Festival premiere of Your Monster, Melissa revealed how "grateful" she was for the experience because, in the long, run it helped her "finally figure out who I'm supposed to be." And now that we're at a time of year where people are retrospective, she feels even more grounded in herself — because while others are just now reflecting on the year they've had, she's been reflecting since long before January.

"Everybody's kind of like thinking of like, 'What does the future hold? Like, how do we make it better?' And I have been thinking that for a year," she says. "There's people that have actually been on this journey for way longer, and it's them that we should be thanking for our world not being like over with right now, you know? They're the ones that continue to make changes for the better and to fight for better things for all of us."

"I definitely feel like a changed person. I definitely feel like my priorities are completely different than they were a year ago," she continues. "I see the world through different eyes now, I see people through different eyes. I see the industry through different eyes, and I'm so grateful for that. I'm so grateful for everything that I went through, even though it was really hard, I'm so grateful that I lived it and that I survived it, and that I'm stronger for it. And that I know I have a focus of what I wanna keep doing, not just for me and my career, but like, how can I contribute to the industry and to the world to make it better and safer for everyone?"

And Your Monster is a beautiful contribution to the industry. I was really struck by the idea of not only confronting your childhood monsters, but befriending them. "I want people to come out of [Your Monster] having had a good time, a good laugh, and just feeling good," she says. "Because I feel like a lot of times you come out of the theater feeling so heavy because movies are so dark [but] that's what Caroline wants with her films. She wants to make movies where people can feel safe in the movie theater."

"Second, I hope that people catch on to the layers of the story and how deep it actually is, and Laura's journey, and the metaphors for how repressed we are," she continues. "And I keep saying women, but it's not necessarily just women, anybody can feel that way. And this idea of befriending the monster in your closet is such a life hack. Imagine not being scared of the thing that scared you in your childhood anymore! Like how liberating and how beautiful to actually fall in love with it and to make peace with it and then be able to go through life fearless like that. I wish that for everyone. So I hope that it makes people think and that they wanna re-watch because there's every time that you watch this movie there, you'll see more of the genius that Caroline injected in like tiny little details."

And for an actress who went to school for theatre and describes it as her "first love" (not to mention the fact she stunned as Vanessa in 2021's In The Heights), she was more than happy to step back onto the stage...kind of. "It was so fun," she says. "Being able to portray that world so accurately too, we had a lot of actual New York theater people come in and do little one-scene things."

"There are people like [Laura's ex] Jacob out there, there's that nervousness, the tension, the excitement, the anticipation, and it's such a beautiful process," she continues. "I love being able to live vicariously through Laura and live out that dream of the Broadway debut. And I think there's such a stigma against theatre and musicals in film, such, like, a rejection that I don't understand because there used to be a time where every movie was a musical and it was amazing! What happened? But to show another side to it through not full face musical, but a little taste of that in a movie that otherwise is a normal movie, I think for me as a theater nerd, as a musical theater geek, it's great to be able to lure people in and be like, 'Look at this beauty, so cool. Maybe go watch musicals!'"