Building gingerbread houses in elementary school usually involved fastening stale cookies to a milk carton, gluing some gumdrops and mints onto your uneven shack with frosting, and watching Frosty the Snowman for the 23rd time. Wasn't it the best?

Forgetting the fun, childlike traditions of the holidays is a quick way to become a Grinch. In an effort to preserve the holiday spirit during such tough times, we decided to infuse a gingerbread house with about as much weed as we could.

There are two ways to approach this — or three, if you have enough money and really want to be home for Christmas this year: Infuse the gingerbread, decorate a normal gingerbread house with edibles, or both. Check out our ganjabread building effort below. Merry Loudmas!

Infused gingerbread
Making infused gingerbread is essentially like making regular gingerbread, but unlike most baked treats, gingerbread calls for vegetable shortening instead of butter or vegetable oil. Not to worry: Although a little stickier than butter and thicker than oil, shortening is still full of fat and can be easily infused using the same method you use to infuse butter — melt the shortening, add your cannabis (we used 3.5 grams), cook on low, and then strain. After that's done, your gingerbread recipe should comprise these ingredients.

Making the House
Knead that weed dough, baby. Throw some flour on a clean counter top, cut the dough into roof and wall pieces, and roll your ganjabread into one-inch-thick pieces. And make some backups. You'll need ’em.

Building
Most dispensaries have many options for outdoor home decor (telling the budtender about your weed-infused blueprint only makes the selection process better), including chocolate bars, gummies, mints, lollipops, baklava bits and more. We went with a chocolate bar, gummies, suckers and infused stroopwafels, as well as some buds and a joint for ornamental purposes.


Decorating
Just make sure you have enough frosting to cement the decorations, and caulk away. Lollipops were obvious trees, while the stroopwafels made great cottage tiles.

Gummies, cookies and chocolate bar squares are all very versatile and well-suited for baked imaginations. We cut up the gummies for windows, lawn ornaments and lollipop tree holders, and used the chocolate bar squares as a door and lawn tiles. If you're flush with buds, why not add a little shrubbery to your winter getaway? And don't forget a chimney.

Between the ganjabread and all the edible decorations, our house wound up containing around 800 milligrams. If yours winds up about the same, remember to destroy your work slowly.