A plain store kit, a strand of candy bulbs and the alphabet piped in white icing. Photo shared on Reddit by u/Turn_Paige_394.
Our Gingerbread house came from the Upside Down
by u/Turn_Paige_394 in r/StrangerThings
A Stranger Things gingerbread house comes two ways. You buy one of the cookie house kits sold under the show’s name, or you build one of the show’s houses yourself: the Byers house with its Christmas lights and alphabet wall, the tall Creel House, or a house with its Upside Down twin hanging underneath. This guide covers both routes and tells you which one fits the time and the hands you have.
Search for it and you mostly find short videos, a Pinterest board and two shop listings. The only written tutorials are from 2016 and 2017. The kits got a news write-up when they reached stores in September 2025, and the shop pages carry a handful of ratings between them. Nobody puts the kit question and the build question in one place, and nobody says which details make a house read as the show. This page brings the two together.
By a Stranger Things gingerbread house we mean both a boxed kit with the show’s name on it and a house you build from a plain kit or your own dough. Both routes are here, and so are the two techniques the show asks of you: lettering an alphabet on a wall, and hanging one house under another.
If you have a teenager who has watched every season twice, this is the gingerbread house that finally gets them to the table. If you saw the cookie house kit online and want to know what is in the box before you hunt one down, the kit sections answer that first. And if you want the alphabet wall to come out straight and the Creel House to look like the Creel House, the build sections are written for you.
You will get what each kit holds and where it was sold, a way to make kit icing hold, a letter-by-letter layout for the alphabet wall, the window trick that makes the Creel House glow, and the anchor method fans use to hang the Upside Down. We have grouped it into three parts: the kits, the three houses, and building it with the people at your table.
The first decision, and the one that shapes everything after it, is whether you are buying a kit or building the house yourself, so start there.
1. Buy the Kit or Build the House
Buy a kit if you can find one and want a project that is finished in an evening. Build the house if you cannot find a kit, or if you want it to look like a real place from the show, which no kit does. Those are the two routes, and the rest of this page follows each of them in turn.
The time gap between them is large. One family who decorated a ready-baked kit as an Upside Down house said it took about an hour to assemble and decorate. At the other end, a baker who built a detailed Creel House replica put it at “maybe 150 hours spread out over a month.” Most home builds land between those two: an afternoon for a plain kit dressed as the Byers house, a weekend for a house baked from a template.
The answer forks on two things. If you are building with children under eight, take a kit, or a plain kit dressed up, because the structure is the part they cannot help with and the lights are the part they love. If you are building with teens or adults and have a weekend, bake your own walls, because a kit wall is usually too small to hold the full alphabet. The second fork is whether anyone will eat it. A house you plan to eat is held together with icing only. A house that is only for display can use the sticks and glue the Upside Down needs.
The picker below asks those questions and gives you the house, the shopping list and the one step that decides whether it works.
Which Stranger Things House Should You Make?
Four answers and it picks the house, the route and the one thing that decides whether it works.
Get this right:
For planning only, not a guarantee of how any kit or build turns out. Not safety advice: check every label for allergens. Your answers stay in this browser and are not sent anywhere. Best Gingerbread Houses is not affiliated with Netflix or the kit makers.
2. What Is in the Two Stranger Things Kits
Two cookie house kits were sold under the show's name in the 2025 season. The Creel House kit is a 20.5 ounce box of pre-baked chocolate cookie pieces with icing, candy and cardboard scene setters. The Upside Down kit is a 7 ounce box with a small stand that holds the finished house upside down. Neither one requires any baking at all.
| Kit | Size | What is in the box | Price seen | Where it was sold |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Stranger Things Creel House Chocolate Cookie House Kit, by Cookies United | 20.5 oz; one grocery listing gives 19 oz | Pre-baked chocolate cookie pieces, pre-made icing, a spooky candy mix, scene setters | Last listed at $14.99 at Kroger and Mariano's | Kroger, Fry's, Mariano's, Albertsons, Giant Food Stores |
| Netflix Stranger Things Upside Down Cookie House Kit | 7 oz | Pre-baked cookies, pre-made icing, candy bones and bats, scene setters, a small stand to display it upside down | $5 at Five Below | Five Below, Walmart, Instacart |
The Creel House box is the bigger build: a chocolate house with a candy mix and scenery, close in size to an ordinary supermarket kit. The Upside Down box is small and cheap, and its whole idea is the stand. Parade's write-up of the Five Below kit singled out that stand as the fun part.
Best Gingerbread Houses is not affiliated with Netflix or with either kit maker, and nothing on this page uses the show's artwork. The builds further down use shapes, colors and candy you can buy anywhere.
3. Are the Kits Any Good?
They are good for the theme pieces and weak on structure, so buy one for the scene setters, the candy and the stand, and expect the icing to be the difficult part.
The ratings are too thin to lean on in either direction. When we checked, the Creel House kit showed 2.0 stars from 2 ratings at Kroger and Mariano's, and Walmart's listing for the Upside Down kit showed 2.0 stars from 5 ratings, out of stock at $25.00. Seven ratings across two products tell you very little, except that a few people were disappointed enough to say so.
What people do say about building them is remarkably consistent. Parade's writer put the catch plainly: you have to get the house to glue together with the kit's own icing, and she advised decorating the pieces before you assemble anything. A builder who posted a Creel House kit build described walls leaning at angles she did not choose, icing squishing out under pressure, and pieces falling before the icing had set. She also found that dark chocolate cookie shows every crumb and fingerprint.
So, by kit: the Upside Down box at $5 is worth buying as a toy if you see one, especially for a child who loves the show. The Creel House box is worth its price if you treat the icing pouch as a backup and glue the walls with your own. If you cannot find either, you are not missing much that a plain kit cannot give you, which is where the build sections come in.
4. Where to Find a Stranger Things Gingerbread House Kit in 2026
Both kits were seasonal stock for the 2025 season, and we could not confirm either on a shelf for 2026. On 3 October 2026, the Five Below product page redirected to its homepage, and the Kroger and Fry's pages for the Creel House kit showed it as unavailable. We found no announced 2026 version of either kit. That situation can change quickly once the holiday aisles fill with seasonal stock.
In 2025 the Creel House kit sat in grocery stores, in the seasonal candy and gingerbread kit aisles at Kroger, Fry's, Mariano's, Albertsons and Giant Food Stores. The Upside Down kit sold at Five Below, through Walmart's site and through Instacart. One shopper on the show's Reddit forum also reported Publix carrying a Stranger Things gingerbread house.
Themed kits follow the same shelf calendar as other Halloween cookie house kits: they arrive from early September and thin out through October, and the Christmas boxes replace them. If you want one, here is the order to look in:
- Check Five Below and the seasonal aisle of your grocery chain from late September, and ask staff whether a shipment is due.
- Search Instacart and your grocery app by the exact kit name, which shows what nearby stores list.
- Treat marketplace listings well above the shelf price as resellers, not stock.
- If you have nothing by the middle of October, stop hunting and dress a plain kit instead.
Picture a parent on 25 October whose son has asked for "the Stranger Things one" since the start of the month. After three stores and no kit anywhere, a plain gingerbread kit, a bag of small colored candies and a bottle of black gel cost less than the reseller wanted, and by Sunday night the house has a strand of candy lights and a wall of letters, and he never asks about the box again.
5. Make Kit Icing Hold Before You Decorate
Decorate the pieces flat, glue the walls, prop them, and wait. That order prevents the common kit failures, because the icing in a kit is both the glue and the decoration, and it cannot do both jobs at once.
Icing needs time before it carries weight. The rule on our icing guide is two hours before a roof goes on, four before heavy candy, and overnight before the house is moved. Prop each wall with a can or a mug while it sets, and do not test a joint by pushing it. Pipe more icing than looks necessary along the inside of each seam, where it will not show.
If the pouch runs thin or stays soft, swap it. A bowl of homemade royal icing made stiff enough to hold a peak sets harder than most kit pouches and costs very little. Keep the kit icing for the decorating, where a softer consistency does not matter.
Say you open the Creel House box on a Friday night and stand all four chocolate walls at once. By the time the roof goes on, two walls have leaned out, the icing has squeezed into blobs, and the roof slides. The same box built over two evenings goes differently: decorate the panels flat on Friday, glue and prop the walls, and set the roof on Saturday once the walls have held overnight. The icing and the cookies are identical in both versions; the only thing that changed was the waiting.
For the Upside Down kit, wait until the whole house has set overnight before you put it in its stand. A house hung upside down puts every joint under pull rather than weight, and wet icing gives up first.
6. The Byers House: Christmas Lights and an Alphabet Wall
If you want to go further, skip the house and build the room. This Byers living room, with its lights and painted alphabet wall, was shared by u/aphrahannah.
I made the Byers' living room out of gingerbread.
by u/aphrahannah in r/StrangerThings
The Byers house reads as the show from two details: a strand of colored Christmas lights, and the alphabet painted on the wall beneath them. Get those right and a plain house becomes the Byers house, because everything else about it is an ordinary small house.
Start from any plain kit, or bake the walls yourself from our printable farmhouse gingerbread house, which gives you a plain small house with a porch. Baking your own lets you cut a side wall big enough for the full alphabet, which a kit wall usually is not.
For the lights, pipe a loose black line in shallow loops along the roofline and across the wall, like a strand drooping between nails. Press a small colored candy onto the wire every finger width, mixing the colors. Loops matter more than neat spacing, because a straight line reads as a ruler while a looped one reads as a string of lights.
Black icing that tastes of something other than dye is a solved problem. Stir a paste of black cocoa and a little water into white royal icing first, then add a few drops of black gel. Our Halloween gingerbread house ideas page covers that method in full.
The Letter Map
The alphabet is where most Byers houses go wrong, and it goes wrong in one predictable way: the letters start large and confident, and the wall runs out before the alphabet does. The fix is to map the letters before you pipe a single one. We call it the Letter Map.
- Measure the wall you are piping on, flat on the table, before the house is built.
- Take a quarter inch off each edge, then split the width into nine equal columns and the height into three rows.
- Assign the rows: the three rows most fan builds copy are A to H, I to Q and R to Z. The first row has eight letters, so center it by starting half a column in.
- Mark each letter's position with a toothpick, pipe the letters in thin black icing, and put a bulb above each one once the letters are dry.
Picture a family piping freehand on a kit side wall about five inches across. A, B and C go on at half an inch each, and they look great. By the middle row the letters are squeezing together, the K comes out backwards in the rush, and the wall ends at S. An Upside Down themed house posted to the show's Reddit forum in 2018 came out exactly that way, and the comments noticed at once. Five inches holds all 26 letters at half an inch apart, but only if the spacing is decided first.
Pipe the letters while the wall is flat, since lettering on a standing wall means piping sideways, and letters piped sideways wander. The planner below does the Letter Map arithmetic for any wall and shows which bulbs light up for a word you choose.
The Alphabet Wall Planner
Enter the wall you are piping on and a word to spell. It spaces all 26 letters in three rows so the alphabet never runs out of wall, and gives you the pencil marks.
Space per letter: · Letter height: about
Measurements are from the left edge and the top of the wall, rounded to the nearest eighth of an inch, with a quarter inch margin all round. Layout uses the three rows most fan builds copy: A to H, I to Q, R to Z. Guidance only, not a guarantee. Nothing you type leaves this browser.
If your wall is too small for clear letters, pipe the alphabet on a separate flat cookie or a piece of card and stand it beside the house like a sign, or pipe only the letters of one word. A wall that says RUN in three lit bulbs reads as the show just as well as all 26.
7. The Creel House: A Tall Victorian in Dark Red and Black
For a sense of how far a Creel House can go, this scratch build of the real Claremont house, with candy-glass windows, was shared by u/mmhdunn.
My 2025 gingerbread house - Claremont House, aka Creel House from Stranger Things
by u/mmhdunn in r/Baking
The Creel House is the project build: a tall Victorian with steep gables, colored windows and dark walls. The LEGO set of the house renders it in dark red with black trim, and that palette is what makes a gingerbread version read as the Creel House rather than any haunted mansion. LEGO has made gingerbread houses of its own too, and our LEGO gingerbread house sets guide compares every one.
Start from our Victorian gingerbread house template. It prints at about 2.5 by 2.2 by 3.3 inches in 10 pieces, so enlarge it before you cut, following the resizing steps on the same page. Cut the window holes before the panels bake, and fill them with crushed hard candy so it melts into glass in the oven. Light the finished house from inside with a battery tea light and the windows glow.
Color the walls with gel, never liquid, because liquid coloring thins icing until it will not hold a line. Dark red takes a lot of gel, so mix more than you think you need and keep it covered. Whatever you buy, the FDA regulates which color additives may be used in food and how each must be declared on the label, so the bottle tells you what is in it.
The replica builders go further. The baker behind one of the most shared Creel House builds said the stained glass came from drawing on sugar glass with alcohol markers. Those are art markers, not food products, so that trick belongs on a house that is only for display. For an edible house, use edible ink pens sold for food, or simply choose colored candies for the glass.
This is where the build forks. If you have evenings over a month, build the whole house. If you have a weekend, build the front only: one tall facade with its gables and windows, standing on a board with a short side wall behind it for support. From the front it reads as the full house, and it takes a fraction of the time. With children under eight, skip the Creel House and give them the Byers lights instead.
8. The Upside Down: Hang a Second House Under the First
The Upside Down build is two houses: the normal one standing on a raised base, and a dark copy hanging beneath it, roof down, like a reflection. It is the most recognizable Stranger Things idea there is, and it is mostly an engineering problem rather than a decorating one.
The method that works comes from a 2016 build posted to the show's Reddit forum, one of the most upvoted gingerbread posts there. The houses were roughly eight inches tall, and the "ground" was one side of a cardboard box standing on its side. The builder attached lollipop sticks as anchors to the inner walls of the hanging house, pushed the sticks through holes in the cardboard, bent each one 90 degrees flat against the top, and used "a lot of hot glue."
The rule that keeps it standing, or rather hanging, is weight. Make the hanging house small and light, because every gram pulls on the anchors and on icing joints that were built to be pressed, not pulled. A tiny gingerbread house hangs far more happily than a full-size one. Hang it only after every joint has set overnight.
For the look, ice the hanging house gray and black, run black licorice laces over it as vines, and scatter white sugar sprinkles around it for the floating specks. Keep the red for the sky behind it, on the board or a card backdrop. If you reach for glitter, check the label: the FDA advises using glitter and dust on food only when the product is made to be edible, and removing any decorations that are not before the food is served.
The edible fork matters here. If anyone plans to eat it, skip the hot glue and the hanging. Lay the Upside Down copy on its roof on a lower board in front of the upright house, or stand the whole build on its side against a backdrop like the kit's stand does. If it is for display only, hang it, glue it, and treat the whole thing as a decoration, as one commenter on that build put it: once the hot glue goes in, it is no longer something you eat.
Say a teenager hangs a full-size kit house under a shoebox lid with four lollipop sticks and icing alone. It holds for an evening, but by morning the house has peeled away from its own roof and dropped onto the table. The same build with a mini house, sticks bent flat on top and a day of setting stays up through the holidays. The only real difference between the two builds is the weight hanging from the anchors.
9. One House From Halloween to Christmas
A Stranger Things house suits both holidays, because the show's most famous image of home is a wall of Christmas lights, and the Upside Down is pure Halloween. The final season arrived between late November and New Year's Eve 2025, right in the middle of gingerbread season.
Build in October and dress the yard for Halloween with candy bats and crushed chocolate cookie soil. In December, brush the soil away, sift powdered sugar snow over the roof and the board, and let the candy lights carry the season. The house itself never has to move, so the change takes a few minutes rather than an afternoon.
Kept dry and away from heat, a house built in October can stay on display into January. Our guide to how long a display house keeps covers what changes over that time. By that point it is a decoration rather than food, whatever it was made from.
10. Building It With Children Under Eight
Give young children the parts of the project that can be entirely theirs. They press the candy bulbs onto the wire, they decorate the flat pieces before assembly, and they build the yard. An adult pipes the letters, handles the black icing, and keeps the sticks, skewers and small hard candies out of small hands.
The Byers lights are the best Stranger Things job for this age. A child does not need to spell anything to make a strand of lights, and the lit-up house is usually the part they remember afterwards.
Questions People Ask About Stranger Things Gingerbread Houses
Is there an official Stranger Things gingerbread house kit?
Yes, two were sold in the 2025 season: the Stranger Things Creel House Chocolate Cookie House Kit by Cookies United and the Netflix Stranger Things Upside Down Cookie House Kit, both pre-baked cookie kits rather than true gingerbread. We could not confirm either on sale for 2026 when we checked on 3 October.
Can you eat a Stranger Things gingerbread house?
You can eat one held together with icing and decorated with candy sold as food, and it tastes best within the first week or two. Anything built with hot glue, wire, sticks or art markers is a display piece, and any inedible decoration should come off before anyone eats a piece.
How long does a Stranger Things gingerbread house take?
About an hour of hands-on time for a ready-baked kit, plus time for the icing to set. An afternoon for a plain kit dressed as the Byers house, a weekend for a house baked from a template, and weeks for a detailed Creel House.
How do you write the alphabet on a gingerbread house?
Map the letters before you pipe anything. Split the flat wall into nine columns and three rows, A to H, I to Q and R to Z, mark each letter with a toothpick, then pipe thin black letters while the wall is still lying flat.
Find Your Starting Kit With Best Gingerbread Houses
Every route on this page starts with a house that holds together, whether that is a themed box, a plain kit you dress up, or walls you bake yourself. Get the structure right and the lights, the letters and the Upside Down are the fun part.
If you are starting from a box, our gingerbread house kit ratings grade all 31 kits we have reviewed on how well they hold together, which is the quality that matters most once you start hanging houses upside down.