Putting together a gingerbread house from scratch is a classic, fun holiday activity. Creative! Delicious! Festive! Of course, you can buy a kit, but plenty of Martha Stewart types prefer to bake their own.
And then there's Christine McConnell of Highland, CA. The visual artist and photographer transformed her parents' entire house into a pretty outrageous home any gingerbread man worth his weight in cookies would be happy to call his own.
Popsugar spotted the spectacle on Reddit, an online community of which McConnell is a member. She regularly wows Redditors and her 223,000 Instagram followers with pictures of her ultracreative projects, raking in scores of up-votes and likes along the way.
You may remember McConnell's previous effort: a terrifying eyeball-covered creation for Halloween.
It took McConnell more than 100 hours to transform the home for the winter holiday season.
"The story of Hansel and Gretel has been a lifelong favorite of mine, and since gingerbread houses are so popular this time of year, I thought I'd combine the two," McConnell says.
"This was probably the hardest project I've ever tackled, but I'm so happy with it," she says. "I spent seven, full, 15-hour days working in total."
That's a whole lot of free time. But it seems she needed it, because some of the elements were tricky to implement.
"The creation and application of the net for the roof was the most difficult part, and is probably my least favorite feature," McConnell says. "The house is pretty versatile with what you can do, so I really went all out."
That she did, and people on social media are eating it up.
"My favorite part of the whole project was shooting the house," McConnell says. "I made all the costumes, and getting dressed up with my nieces was so much fun!"
McConnell uses an HDR camera to shoot the images, then manipulates them with photo editing software to remove pesky things like electrical wires, neighbors' homes -- anything that doesn't align with her vision for the biggest, baddest decorations on the block.
With Halloween under her belt, and the glory of Christmas looming, we can't wait to see what she has lined up for Groundhog Day.