I am making some 4" cakes for my sister to give to her staff at work. The theme is 12 days of christmas. I love these little cakes:
http://www.cakecentral.com/cake-photo_1527856.html

Thinking something simple like this but each cake having a simple decoration for the day of christmas. Most of them are pretty easy to do but am having trouble with the 'Maids a milking' and the 'Lords a leaping' .
I really don't want to put people on them but can't think of anything that would show what it is and still be simple.

Any ideas?

How about a wooden milk bucket with "milk" looking like it is sloshing out for maids a milking? And for lords a leaping, what about shoes and legs that look like they are in mid-leap? You could get away with doing "no people" if you do the shoes/legs in 2-D (like a picture on the cake) rather than 3-D (like a figurine standing vertically).

Milk bucket sounds like a good idea. Thanks. Maybe once i get a few of the days done I will find some more inspiration.

Sounds like a cute idea but A LOT of work! If you're not set on something 3D on top of the cake, you could do a FBCT of something like this:
http://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://i741.photobucket.com/albums/xx59/shmods/Events/ohhohoho.png&imgrefurl=http://community.livejournal.com/sortinghat_rp/tag/event&usg=__MF8aJY8HNSAUz9zhAtFrYEVFQIg=&h=413&w=413&sz=236&hl=en&start=19&zoom=1&tbnid=fgM2l5NIrEd2mM:&tbnh=125&tbnw=125&prev=/images%3Fq%3Dlords%2Ba%2Bleaping%26hl%3Den%26rlz%3D1W1SNYX%26biw%3D1276%26bih%3D576%26gbv%3D2%26tbs%3Disch:10%2C304&itbs=1&ei=HUrjTMbRL4GOnwfVptzPDg&biw=1276&bih=576&iact=rc&dur=290&oei=F0rjTKfHEIHKnAeugN2YDg&esq=2&page=2&ndsp=22&ved=1t:429,r:1,s:19&tx=73&ty=61

If you want 3D, you could do 2 or 3 little leap frogs with crowns and capes (and a # 10 on the cake)

Thanks, it is a lot of work. I didn't mention that it is actually 4 sets of the 12 days of Christmas....48 mini cakes. I am making my sister help me though. I am starting to think that 3d is going to be a pain in the butt, so i might do 2 sets with 3d and the other two sets with 2d images or maybe even just sillouettes. I am going to have a good look through all my cricut cartridges and see if I couldn't do most of them on there. I don't use it much really but to do multiples of the same thing it would probably save me time.