The Gertrude C. Ford Center for the Performing Arts opened their annual Holiday Village to the public, featuring gingerbread houses, a ceramic village, and a LEGO display on Dec. 6. The Ford Center has been putting on their holiday exhibit for the past 14 years, starting in 2010, making this the 15th year of the exhibit. Since then, community members have signed up to participate in the exhibit, each participant creating their own gingerbread house.
“In 2010, the director of the Ford Center at the time saw the idea somewhere and thought this would be something fun to do here,” Head of Marketing and Publicity Director Kate Meacham said. “It was around the middle of November, so it was really late when he thought about it. So we kind of called around to see if anybody was interested in making gingerbread houses. And we ended up with four that year in 2010. And it was just so much fun that we decided to try it again the next year. This is now the 15th year that we’ve done it. All of the gingerbread houses are made by people in the community.”
Each volunteer goes about making their house in different ways. Some use only gingerbread, while others use a more stable version with hot glue and cardboard. Either way, both types of houses are extravagantly decorated, each with a different theme.
“We want them to be made visibly edible,” Meacham said. “Some people make them completely with edible materials or almost edible. Others do the internal structure, a base structure of cardboard or something, and they use hot glue. Doing it with all edible materials is really advanced, and can be a lot. We want people to have fun with it”
Oxford High School has its very own Holiday Village volunteers, including both Junior Hardy Allen and her mother as well as the OHS Superiors. The Allen family and the Superiors both have their own unique gingerbread houses featured in the village.
“My mom and I kept coming up with ideas to take creepy movies or pop culture scenes and make them Christmas themed, and finally we thought of Edward Scissorhands,” Allen said. The majority of the movie takes place at Christmas time, so it made more sense than making up a Christmas scene with a different movie. We also thought that the scenery in that movie would be easy
to recognize.”
The OHS Superiors have been participating in building gingerbread houses for around six years. They work hand in hand with the librarian Amanda Osborne and the National Honors Society.
“We’ve done it in different ways throughout the years,” Kristen Busby, OHS special education teacher, said. “Some years we’ve collaborated with culinary arts, and have had them make the gingerbread. We’ve learned by trial and error that we do not need to use white icing, instead we hot glue them. The National Honor Society comes in and assembles the houses so they’re already ready to decorate with white icing. We build them in one day and decorate them, and then the honor society assembles them into a village or a theme. Every year Osborne comes up with the theme for our gingerbread houses.”
