Gingerbread House Workshop Offered

Come and decorate your own gingerbread house Tuesday, Dec. 18, at 6 p.m. at the First Lutheran Church. For decorating fun, plan to attend and create your masterpiece from a prebuilt gingerbread house. Creativity will be unlimited as the houses are decorated. Bring your ideas and we will provide the supplies. This is a great activity for families, grandparents and grandchildren, husbands and wives or even groups of youth. Everyone is invited to participate and make memories this Christmas season. There will be a $15 fee for supplies.

You must reserve a house to decorate. Please contact the Valley County Extension Office to preregister for this class at 228-6241.

Gingerbread houses are as traditional as Christmas trees and evergreen boughs. Gingerbread has been baked in Europe for centuries. In some places, it was a soft, delicately spiced cake; in others, a crisp, flat cookie, and in others, warm, thick, steamy-dark squares of “bread,” It was almost always cut into shapes such as men, women, stars or animals, and colorfully decorated or stamped with a mold and dusted with white sugar to make the impression visible.

Ginger was also discovered to have a preservative effect when added to pastries and bread, and this probably led to the development of recipes for ginger cakes, cookies. Gingerbread began spreading throughout Western Europe at the end of the eleventh century, possibly introduced by crusaders returning from wars in the Eastern Mediterranean.

Germany has one of the longest traditions of flat, shaped gingerbreads. Nuremberg is known as the “gingerbread capital of the world.” Here fine craftsmen contribute to the most beautiful gingerbread creations.

In North America, gingerbread and gingerbread houses were introduced by the European settlers. Here, it is Christmas time when gingerbread makes its most impressive appearance. From elaborate Victorian houses, heavy with candies and sugar icicles to Hansel and Gretel houses, the Gingerbread house means a richly decorated Christmas decoration created with families in mind.