Editor’s note: This sweet essay on gingerbread and the sweet memories it creates made it a perfect fit for EC. I know you’ll enjoy this great read.
When I was a little girl, a gingerbread house arrived in the mail each year just after Thanksgiving, sent by two great aunts from my father’s faraway side of the family. My parents would set the gingerbread house down in the middle of the table after Sunday dinner, and we would take turns breaking off pieces of the roof and window panes, strategically releasing the most coveted bits of candy. It always seemed a solemn activity, the slow deconstruction of the beautiful gift sent by the mysterious spinster aunts we had never met, but we nibbled away at the house like little mice, feasting upon gumdrop bushes and toffee shingles until all of our late November memories were sweetened by a sugary glaze of royal icing.
Gingerbread houses sweeten our cultural memories as well, and the most famous gingerbread house arrives on our literary doorstep wrapped in a German fairy tale. This semester, I set the story of Hansel and Gretel down in the center of my classroom and watched as my college students consumed it, breaking off quotations to use as evidence in their papers about famine, tricksters, and collaborative siblings. Although the fairy tale is defined by the Aarne-Thompson-Uther index as a story about abandoned children who encounter a malevolent creature in the woods, it is the gingerbread house which acts as a visual shorthand for the tale, and it is the gingerbread house which held my students’ imaginations captive.
Having remembered elaborate illustrations of the house from their own childhood encounters with Hansel and Gretel, my students were surprised to learn that the Brothers Grimm describe only a house “made of bread” with a roof “made of cake and the windows of sparkling sugar”. Each artist who has illustrated the tale since the Grimm publication has added delicious detail to the architecture of the house, and generations of readers have eagerly gobbled up the candy-coated pictures.
Some histories of gingerbread explore the odd intersection of witch houses and the Christmas season by investigating the Scandinavian tradition of baking gingerbread houses to celebrate St. Lucy’s Day, a Christian holiday with connections to pagan solstice celebrations when trolls and witches roamed wild. Still other histories trace the movement of gingerbread to America where a softer version of the delicacy was popularized by George Washington’s mother, Mary Bell Washington.
Long before it was baked into bread, ginger was used to season food and drinks. It is known to heal an upset stomach, stop nightmares, and inspire passion. Gingerbread has been given as love tokens, shaped into seasonal symbols, sold outside of churches, and worn as talismans for protection against evil spirits. The versatile dough can be molded into cabins or castles, and its magic spice is said to warm the heart and soul of the people who eat it. Gingerbread is both food and art, giving us the sustenance we need to survive and the creative spark we need to make our lives worth living.
Fairy tale gingerbread can build more than houses, as we learn from the magical folk tale “The Gingerbread Man.” In the most popular version of the story, first printed in the 1875 issue of St. Nicholas Magazine, an old woman who longs for a child bakes one out of gingerbread only to have him run away from everyone who tries to catch him. When my son read the story in kindergarten, his teacher donned a gingerbread man suit and led the children on a wild chase through the hallways of the school. Kindergarten students are not the only ones to have such fun with their food. The creation of gingerbread men dates all the way back to the English court of Queen Elizabeth I who had her royal bakers transform dough into the likeness of foreign dignitaries to entertain her guests, as explained in this history of the confection in Time magazine.
One cold November day after my son had read the story of “The Gingerbread Man,” we watched a television show featuring professional bakers competing in a gingerbread house contest, a tradition still popular today. We were in awe as they baked life-sized sheets of gingerbread, decorating their houses with sugar spun so fine it glistened like stained glass. Inspired by the show, we decided to do some baking of our own. We poured over pictures like the ones found here. We dug out my grandmother’s recipe for gingerbread men and shaped the dough into stars of various sizes, stacking them up to form simple gingerbread trees. We whipped up batches of white frosting, swirling it into drifts of edible snow.
Sadly, our dough was too thick, our icing was too thin, and it wasn’t long before my three young sons were chasing each other around the kitchen, leaving molasses fingerprints on the cabinets and trailing clouds of powdered sugar behind them. Still, my memories of that precious Christmas season are permeated by the glorious scent of my grandmother’s gingerbread which lingered in the air long after our tiny cake creations had collapsed. My sons tower over me now, ready to run like gingerbread men as fast as they can into adolescence and adulthood, but when I close my eyes in the November twilight and inhale the spicy smell of ginger mixed with cinnamon, I can still feel the sticky warmth of their little boy kisses brushing against my cheek.
Late November is a time of darkness, a time of thankfulness, a time for gingerbread houses. Gingerbread houses are a lot like families; they are painstakingly built, glued together with the sweet icing of childhood memories, and they are meant to withstand gentle deconstruction, for it is only in the splintering that the most coveted bits of candy are revealed. When my sons grow up and venture out into the forest, I hope that they will stuff their pockets with sugary chunks of memory broken off from the home we have built together. I hope each gumdrop bite will bring them happiness and sweeten their lives with treasured recollections of time gone by. And most of all, I hope that beneath each frosted candy memory that bursts upon their tongues, my boys will taste the magic spice of love which transforms their sturdy slabs of gingerbread into talismans of protection that they can carry with them to warm their hearts and souls.
***
Bio: Kelly Jarvis teaches classes in literature, writing, and fairy tale at Central Connecticut State University, The University of Connecticut, and Tunxis Community College. She lives, happily ever after, with her husband and three sons in a house filled with fairy tale books.
***
Images, in order, by Charles Folkard and Otto Kugel.