This holiday season you could certainly bake up a batch of gingerbread, draw house plans, and erect the next great masterpiece.

However, for many would-be gingerbread house enthusiasts, baking may seem like a chore, and more pleasure will be derived from the decorating aspect of gingerbread house building.

Enter graham crackers. These tasty cookie-crackers are a viable alternative to messing with sheets of gingerbread. They're also easier to handle and come in many flavors.

If children will be involved with gingerbread house decorating, consider assembling the house and let the youngsters have fun decorating.

Construct a gingerbread house yard. Simply get a rectangular cake board or thick piece of cardboard roughly the size of a letter-size piece of paper and cover it with foil.Gather all of the materials you'll need for the house:• 6 sheets of graham crackers per house• One to two batches of royal icing• A variety of decorations, including spearmint rings, candy-covered chocolate or peanut butter candies, licorice, pretzels, ribbon candy, jelly beans, and other items you can think of• A serrated knife for cutting

Create the walls with four square sections of cracker. The peaked roof uses two three-quarter crackers and the spaces between the end walls and the roof peaks can be carved out of the quarter sections left over from the roof.Use a pastry bag filled with the royal icing to use as mortar for the house. If you don't have a pastry bag and tip, simply put the icing into a large plastic zipper bag, tie off one end with a twist tie and cut a hole in the corner of the bag the size of the icing bead you'll need.To assemble the house, run the icing along two sides of the walls of the house. Stick the bottom of one wall to the yard and press another wall to the side, repeating until you have all four walls standing.For extra support, put more icing on the inside corners of all the walls. Make sure the graham crackers just meet at the corners during assembly and are not overlapping.For the roof, ice the edges of the triangular peak pieces and attach to the top of the short ends of the house frame. Use extra icing for attaching the roof and double what you used for the walls. Ice the remaining roof pieces and attach to the peaks.Put an extra coating of icing along the length of the peak of the roof and fill in any gaps on the entire structure. Let the icing harden before decorating. Cover the remaining icing so it won't dry out.

Let imaginations soar with regard to decorating. Cookies can serve as a thatched roof, pretzel sticks for windows. How about gumdrop bushes by the front door? If you must eat the creation, do so in a few days otherwise it will grow stale.