If you’re looking for a simple, festive, and fun holiday craft, look no further! These DIY cardboard Gingerbread Men and Women ornaments are perfect for decking the halls, making with kids, or giving as last minute handmade gifts. The best part? You don’t need to bake a thing! Let’s get started.

Materials You’ll Need:

  • FREE printable gingerbread templates (download link below)
  • Cardboard (recycle old boxes!)
  • Scissors
  • Markers, paint pens, or other craft supplies for decorating
  • String or ribbon for hanging
  • Glue

Pro Tip: Choose your favorite team colors, to make them sports related!

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Step 1: Download and Cut Out the FREE Templates

First things first, grab the FREE Gingerbread Men and Women templates, in 3 sizes, below. These will help guide the shapes of your ornaments. Once downloaded, print them out and cut them along the lines to create your tracing templates.

Gingerbread TemplatesDownload

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Step 2: Trace Templates onto Cardboard

Grab some cardboard from old boxes (hello, recycling!) and place your gingerbread templates on top. Using a pencil or marker, carefully trace around the templates to outline your gingerbread people.

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Step 3: Cut Out Your Cardboard People

Now that you’ve got your gingerbread people outlines, carefully cut them out with scissors. You’ll end up with a stack of adorable cardboard gingerbread people, ready for decorating!

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Step 4: Time to Decorate!

Now comes the fun part—decorating! Whether you want to go classic or get creative, this step is where your gingerbread people come to life. Grab your markers, paint, glitter glue, or any other crafty supplies you have on hand. Use these to add faces, “frosting” details, buttons, and even clothing!

You can decorate your gingerbread people in all sorts of ways. To give you some inspiration, I’m sharing a few examples in the pictures below. You’ll see gingerbread people of different sizes and all kinds of decorating techniques, from simple marker designs to 3D embellishments like pom-poms and buttons.

I decorated the 3.5 people by outlining with a white paint pen, and detailing with gel pens:

The decorations on the 4.5″ boy and girl were all done with various colors of paint pens:

I pulled out my holiday craft box for some “fancy” decorations on the 6″ people, using pipe cleaners, rick rack, 2 sizes of pompoms, and some craft buttons:

Pro Tip: If you’re making these with kids, let them have free rein to make their gingerbread people as colorful and silly as they want!

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Step 5: Add a Loop for Hanging

Once your gingerbread people are decorated, it’s time to make them into ornaments! Cut a length of string, and simply glue the ends to the back of each cardboard person’s head, and voilà—your gingerbread ornament is ready to hang on the tree or a gift box!

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These DIY cardboard gingerbread people are not only easy and fun to make, but they’re also a great way to add a handmade touch to your holiday décor. Happy crafting!

See you next time, when we’ll back to more team spirit related content!

Carrie

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