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Gingerbread: Making homes for the holidays

Fact or fiction, ingredient adds candied real estate at local festival

It’s a German tradition, an American tradition and, now, it has become a Durango Christmas tradition.

What started with a few local families coming together and decorating their homemade gingerbread houses has grown to a festival of 100, gathering to create gingerbread masterpieces, some elaborate works of sugar-sweet art and others fun and edible, with rock-candy ponds and gum-drop characters.

Fuzziwig’s Candy Factory of Durango hosted the event Sunday in the Durango & Silverton Narrow Gauge Railroad Museum.

Ella Wiener, 10, and Abby Fehr, 11, used hard candy and licorice for the finer details of their creation, which had a dog and a dog house, cats and even a fish pond out back.

Adam and Maurine Wiener, Ella’s parents, said it has become their favorite thing to do as a family for the holidays.

“We did it last year, too,” Maurine Wiener said. “Just doing creative things for Christmas – all together – and that all of us can take part in. There are very few things like that.”

A spice, ginger can be traced back to the Romans, and shaping gingerbread has roots in Germany. The whole idea of gingerbread houses can be attributed to the fairy tale Hansel and Gretel, a story published by the Brothers Grimm in 1812; German bakers began making model houses from gingerbread cookies, or lebkuchen, soon after. When German immigrants brought the tradition to America, gingerbread houses became a Christmas fixture, and so it has in Durango.

Ella and Abby said they worked for an hour and half, delicately placing red strings of licorice in all the right spots, each sugar-wafer shingle perfectly aligned with another for their roof. Trimmed with hard-candy peppermints, colorful jawbreakers and a “W” for Wiener over the front door, it was finished with a Christmas tree topped by a candy yellow star.

But its days are numbered.

“We’re going to keep it out, and let everybody look at it,” Ella said. “And on Christmas morning, we’re going to eat the whole thing.”

bmathis@durangoherald.com



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