Gingerbread Houses

Yesterday, our family went over to the Grove Park Inn to view their fabulous gingerbread house competition. (Sorry, no photos.) We usually wait later in December to go, and thus miss the grand prize winners who have been flown off to New York City to appear on Good Morning America. But this year we were fortunate and saw the all of the winners (I think.) All of the houses were impressive - even those who did not win a prize.

This visit to the Gingerbread House Competition got me thinking about this sweet treat I associate with Christmastime. So I did a little searching online and turned up some good sources of information about the history of gingerbread and gingerbread houses. For a good overview, take a look at Ginny Pilarz's website. Here is an excerpt from her site. I found it particularly interesting since it talks about the development of the gingerbread house tradition in North America:

Lebkuchen are made throughout Germany and large pieces of lebkuchen are used to build Hexenhaeusle ("witches' houses," from the fairy tale Hansel and Gretel, also called Lebkuchenhaeusel and Knusperhaeuschen ‹ "houses for nibbling at").

During the nineteenth century, gingerbread was both modernized and
romanticized. When the Grimm brothers collected volumes of German fairy tales
they found one about Hansel and Gretel, two children who, abandoned in the woods
by destitute parents, discovered a house made of bread, cake and candies. By the
end of the century the composer Englebert Humperdink wrote an opera about the
boy and the girl and the gingerbread house.

At Christmas, gingerbread makes its most impressive appearance. The German practice of making lebkuchen houses never caught on in Britain in the same way as it did in North America, and it is here still that the most extraordinary creations are found. Elaborate Victorian houses, heavy with candies and sugar icicles, vie in competition with the Hansel and Gretel houses, more richly decorated and ornamented than most children could imagine in their wildest dreams.