Gingerbread Houses Show Kids’ Creativity

Given identical sets of tools--a Hansel and Gretel gingerbread house kit and a handful of candy--the 120 students making houses at Shepherd of the Valley Lutheran School came up with designs as wildly varied as the children themselves.

The basics were there: a house frame, a witch and two sibling characters. But the decorations and designs were uniquely the students’ own.

“They have different creativity, personality and organization,” said Barbara Bixby, a parent volunteer. “One child will have things neatly in rows while other children will kind of just throw it on.”

The school has offered gingerbread house making for the last six years as an after-school enrichment project for the holidays. This year, almost all the school’s 155 children in kindergarten through sixth grade participated.

“Gingerbread houses have been popular for many years,” said Principal Carol Rupnik. “I think there’s something about Christmas and gingerbread. Parents remember them and the children love to work with the candy.”

One second-grader said the house she created this year is the third she’s worked on and she considers it the best yet.

“The candy and the gingerbread stick together better now because I put a lot of frosting” on the house, said Selina Maclaran, 7. “And for some reason I have better ideas on where to put the candy. This one is more like a real house and stuff. It’s more like how you see it in books.”

Some of the students said they will slowly dismantle their houses in the days before Christmas, eating the candy one by one. And others said they will wait until Christmas morning to devour the whole thing with their families.

But one sixth-grader said he doesn’t plan to consume it at all.

“I don’t like candy, I never eat it,” said Joseph Midolo, 11. He said he decided to do the project because, “I just like to use my hands a lot, and because the frosting is messy.”