I realize that most people do not equate making gingerbread houses with making art. I admit, constructing a pre-made gingerbread house that comes in a kit complete with frosting mix and mini gumdrops seems like a fun holiday craft more than anything else. Maybe this is true, but I’d like to think that the gingerbread houses my sister and I create every Thanksgiving from the $12.99 Deluxe Gingerbread House kits are a form of artistic expression.
Let’s start with the preliminary research. When my sister and I are in the beginning stages of gingerbread house planning, say around the first week of November, there are countless pins on Pinterest and Martha Stewart or Southern Living articles that need delving into. Martha suggests candy cane paneling? Add it to the inspiration board! Southern Living has a gingerbread patio complete with a grill and a fire pit? Add those ingredients to the shopping list! By the end of the research period, we have usually amassed countless pins and bookmarks of potential architectural and decorative ideas for our beloved gingerbread houses.
Now comes the sketching portion of the planning process. It’s not possible to transition directly from the research to the actual construction of the house. There are far too many ideas to sort through, so sketching provides the perfect opportunity to pick and choose what elements would look good together. Does the pagoda match the enormous christmas tree? Where should the dog house go? What materials do I need to make this Santa? All of these questions are important in deciding how everything is going to fit together and what it is all going to be made of. While the pagoda sounds cool, is it actually feasible to make out of simply candy canes and sticky frosting?
Once Thanksgiving rolls around, all of the planning and sketches have long been completed. Now it’s time for the actual construction. The putting together of the gingerbread house is a tedious process that requires way too much time, so I won’t bore you with the details. However, the decorating part is when all of the sketches come out on the table and the experimenting takes place. Candy canes are crushed up and mixed with chocolate and nuts to look like festive gravel. Stringy licorice gets tied into bows for the gumdrop wreaths. Cereal is meticulously lined up on the roof to create a shingle-like effect. I decide that the occupants of my house are gardeners, so I add a little shed for their supplies and a small vegetable garden to the side of the house. My sister decides that the elf in charge of taking care of the reindeer lives in her house, so she adds on a reindeer stall complete with four grazing reindeer. This decorating process usually starts right after the Thanksgiving table has been cleared at 7 P.M. and can go on until 12 or 1 in the morning.
So is this process a mere craft or is it something more? While the materials probably relegate it to the realm of holiday crafts, I think that the effort and planning my sister and I put into these houses each year make the finished products seem like works of art in our own eyes. They are our own candy house fantasies, our own visions, and I guess at the end of the day that’s what really matters. If we say that the houses are art, then they are art to us. If someone else thinks differently, then that’s their problem.