While everyone else was making somewhat more traditional ginger bread houses, I used a
molten-sugar hot-glue gun to make some impressively tall candy towers. The first tower was built from M&M's, and eventually the candy shell on the bottom piece fractured and dropped the whole tower. The second tower, built from strawberry and raspberry Pez, looked like something out of Dr. Seuss.
The trigger assembly on the cheap hot-glue guns was a little too small for the sugar glue sticks, so I ripped the assembly out and just fed the sugar with with my thumb.
If you have never used molten-sugar as a construction material, you really need to try. I honestly didn't expect to get much beyond 20 M&M's high, but as you can see I was approaching 3 feet.
The molten sugar might be a little too sticky/stringy, and with the icing you don't have to worry about high temperatures, burning sugar, or for that matter, anyone eating the result. ;-)