DIY Gingerbread House Gift Boxes
These paper gingerbread house boxes make the cutest gift boxes for Christmas treats and gifts!
I love giving neighbor Christmas gifts. Or, I should say I love the idea of it…because reality is I don’t actually get around to it most years. And then I feel bad when we get cute gifts from our neighbors and can’t reciprocate.
But not this year! I was on top of it for once with these cute DIY gingerbread house gift boxes. I whipped up two batches of homemade caramels, and ta-da, neighbor gifts done!
I love gingerbread houses, so I came up with this fun gift box design using brown kraft cardstock and white gel pens. They turned out so cute! And thanks to a Cricut machine, they’re super easy to mass-produce. Get the project instructions below!
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Supplies needed for gingerbread house gift boxes
- Cricut machine: I’m using my Maker 3. I recommend a Cricut Explore or Maker machine for this since you’ll want a machine that can score. You could use a Cricut Joy Xtra, but you’d have to hide the score lines in the project and score them by hand afterwards. See my comparison of the Joy Xtra and Explore 3 machines here.
- brown kraft cardstock
- white gel pen: I used this brand. Unfortunately, Cricut’s white opaque gel pen is notoriously bad at writing so you’ll probably want an alternative brand.
- Cricut pen adapter: Using an off-brand adapter technically voids your machine’s warranty, but if you’re past the one year mark, it’s not an issue. I honestly wish I had tried these adapters sooner because it lets you use so many other types of pens, not just Cricut brand! Get these adapters for Cricut Explore and Maker machines or these adapters for Cricut Joy machines.
- scoring stylus or scoring wheel
- glue: this is my favorite liquid glue for paper crafts
- glue runner
- paper shred/filler
- ribbon
- gift tags: Not pictured, but I made some quick tags with my machine and Cricut pens and tied them on the gift boxes after. You could also grab my FREE printable Christmas tags here.
How to make paper gingerbread house gift boxes
Score, draw, and cut with Cricut
Open my Gingerbread House Gift Box project in Cricut Design Space. Click Make.
On the Prepare screen, you can adjust how many copies you want to make or move pieces on your mat to fit. Click Continue.
Set your base material to Medium Cardstock.
Load a scoring stylus (or scoring wheel) in Clamp A and make sure a fine-point blade is in Clamp B. Load your mat with a sheet of cardstock and load it into your machine. Push Go.
Your machine will score first, then you’ll be prompted to load your pen in the machine.
To use an off-brand gel pen in your Cricut machine, carefully remove the white pen holder piece from Clamp A by pushing up on the bottom–it should pop out the top without too much trouble.
Choose a pen adapter that fits your pen and install this into Clamp A–it won’t snap in like the Cricut one, it just rests there (test your pen first on some scrap paper to make sure the ink is flowing).
Push Go to have your machine draw and cut the project.
Before removing the mat, examine the cardstock and make sure that your gel pen drew everything. If you have lots of missing marks or just want to have your machine re-draw it, DO NOT remove the mat yet. Take the pen out and scribble on some scratch paper to make sure it’s working. Push the start button again on your machine (instead of the blinking arrow button). Your machine will try to score the box first, so you can leave Clamp A empty until Design Space prompts you to put the pen in. Once your machine is finished drawing, you can push the arrow/remove button to remove the mat before your machine tries to cut a second time.
Remove the cardstock from the mat by laying it upside down on your table and peeling the mat away from the cardstock (to avoid curling).
Touch up drawings by hand
Even using this pen, my Cricut machine occasionally skipped some lines when drawing. If you have a steady hand and want to do some touch ups, you can easily draw over those areas by hand. (This may not be necessary, but I’m a perfectionist. 😜)
Assemble boxes
Each box will have a front and a back piece. Fold both on all the score lines.
Apply glue to the side tabs and connect a front and back piece together.
Close the bottom of the box starting with the side shown below and push the two sides in and under the first flap.
Apply glue to the top corners of the side flaps as shown and fold the last flap in and under. You can apply additional glue underneath the flaps from the inside of the box if needed.
Your box is done! How simple is that?!
Fill with treats and share!
Fill each box partway with some paper shred. Then fill the rest of the way with treats or another small gift.
If I were making this gift for myself, I would’ve made my grandma’s black licorice caramels, but I wasn’t sure how well that would go over with my neighbors. So I made regular homemade caramels and a batch of chocolate caramels instead. (Black licorice caramels are way better, fyi…😉)
DIY Christmas gingerbread house gift boxes
I hope you love these boxes! Maybe it’ll inspire you to be more on top of neighbor Christmas gifts than I usually am!
Have a Merry Christmas!
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