A St. Albert service club helped Wild Rose and Robert Rundle students build free gingerbread homes this week.
Grade 1 student Bella Robin built a sweet, sweet house for Santa this week.
“The Christmas tree’s on the ro-oof!” she sang, as she squished a gummy bear tree into her gingerbread home’s icing-covered roof. The roof was also bedecked with many orange, green and yellow candies, which, she cheerfully explained, represented fire, poison, and gold.
When asked how this rooftop would not prove fatal to Saint Nick, Robin explained how she had positioned the home’s chocolate Santa figure next to the home’s chimney and not on any of the fiery poisonous bits.
“It’s probably looks like the greatest house of all,” she said.
The Wild Rose Elementary School gym was a blizzard of gumdrops, sprinkles and frosting-covered fingers and faces Monday as about 60 excited students built free gingerbread houses with the help of volunteers from the St. Albert Associated Canadian Travellers (ACT) service group.
Helping Robin build her dream home was ACT member Carolyn Boychuk, who co-ordinates the group’s gingerbread house initiative in St. Albert.
A lot of kids don’t get to build gingerbread homes and maybe don’t have the best time at Christmas, Boychuk said, when asked about the initiative.
“This is just part of trying to make that (time) special for them.”
Building (sweet) community
Long-time ACT member Bob Clarke said the gingerbread project started about 50 years ago when he was working for the grocery chain Horne & Pitfield, which is now called Sobeys. Back then, store volunteers would (and still do) team up with the Northern Alberta Institute of Technology each December to bake and build free gingerbread houses with patients at the Glenrose Hospital.
About 11 years ago, they had a bunch of extra homes left over from the Glenrose event and someone asked Clarke if he could use them. He teamed up with his friends at ACT to build 25 of them at the Sturgeon Community Hospital and took the rest to Wild Rose, as Boychuk’s grandson, Cameron Shaw, was a student there.
Shaw, now a student at Bellerose, said his whole class got to make their own homes that year, and that he had a blast – so much so that he’s been back every year since to help coach kids on home construction.
“I remember how fun it was for me when I was a kid,” Shaw said, and he wants to show new kids what it’s all about.
“It’s like art you can eat.”
ACT volunteers now help Wild Rose and (as of 2015) Robert Rundle students build about 80 gingerbread homes over two days each December using kits donated by local Sobeys outlets, Boychuk said.
Boychuk said gingerbread house day was a hotly anticipated event at Wild Rose, with kids asking her about it whenever she drops by to visit her grandkids. She recalled how one child even shouted, “There’s the gingerbread people!” upon spotting their float in the Rainmaker Rodeo parade one year.
“We do it because the kids love it and we love it,” she said.
The gingerbread homes help build school community and give kids and seniors a chance to interact, said Wild Rose teacher Erika Krempien. The kids will keep the homes this year, but the houses have been raffled off or eaten at the school’s Christmas dinner in the past.
Robert Rundle kids use their gingerbread homes to reconnect with the community, said principal John Osgood. Students will drop off the 35-odd homes they built Tuesday to local homes next Wednesday, along with some 100 hand-made Christmas cards.
“The purpose is to say, ‘You haven’t been forgotten,’” Osgood said.
