When I decided my boyfriend Kenny and I should enter Logan’s Parade of Gingerbread Homes, neither of us had ever built a gingerbread house before. We had also never attended the Parade of Gingerbread homes.
Gary Saxton, the manager of the Logan Downtown Alliance, is about to give you more background info than we had.
“Well, it’s an event that’s been going on since the year 2000,” Saxton said. “We’re in our 18th year, and it’s a community event just to celebrate Christmas and get the community involved creating gingerbread creations, they don’t necessarily have to be homes, but just gingerbread creations.”
I should tell you that at this point, when I did this interview, Kenny and I had already built the entirety of our gingerbread creation - a miniature holiday version of a famous old barn on the outskirts of Logan. The front displays an advertisement for a product from the turn of the century: “The woman’s tonic, Dr. Pierce’s favorite prescription.” During the interview, I found out that someone had made the same thing in 2012. I also found out that we could have been using a glue gun this whole time.
The final task to complete the house was attaching tiny Christmas lights to the candy cane fences and the roof of the barn, which required drilling a hole in the base so we could run the cords through it. In total, we’ve spent about 15 hours working on this house and about $30. Based on the past entries Saxton showed me during our interview, including gingerbread versions both the Logan and Salt Lake temples and a set of Amsterdam row houses, we’re firmly at the low end of the time and money spectrum.
Over the next month, by Saxton’s estimate, between 1,600 and 2,000 people will vote on the gingerbread houses in the competition, and about 5,000 people total will see them.
“We have 10 creations this year,” Saxton said. “They can go to our website atlogandowntown.org to see all the listings. The best thing to do is to start at any one of the locations and pick up a voting ballot and a map, and you’ll be able to do a loop around wherever you start.”
The event starts Saturday and will continue through the 30th of December.
