Here's What It Takes To Make The World's Largest Gingerbread Village
Jon Lovitch could out-shop an extreme couponer. He's become a pro at scouring Craigslist, scooping up $400 Kitchenaid stand mixers for a mere $80, and he knows just where to look to get good-as-new Ikea shelves for a fifth of the price.
It's a useful skill to have, considering the chef burns through about three mixers a year - and needs a library's worth of shelves to house the fruits of his full-time job: building the world's largest gingerbread village. Lovitch works around the clock, logging about 110 hours a week and plowing through 900-plus pounds of candy, to build all of the houses, shops, and edible snowmen that comprise Gingerbread Lane.
It was a passion he stumbled into almost by accident.
"I never cared, and then about seven or eight years ago, I caught some piece on one of the network evening news [about] the world's largest gingerbread village, and I'm like, 'I want to see this,'" Lovitch said. "It wasn't even a third of the size of what I make."
It set him on a path to see if there was a Guinness World Record for the largest village - and what it'd take for him to claim the title. At first, Lovitch was working as a professional chef for a hotel in New York City, baking gingerbread houses on the side, but as he got more into making them, they started eating away at his downtime. And his ability to sleep. So, eventually, he made the leap, and decided to start making houses full-time, which he'd get paid to display all over the country.
Last year, Lovitch broke his previous record, completing a whopping 1,251 gingerbread houses. This year, he's on pace to beat that. He's built 1,314 so far, but 1,350 is his end goal. When he's done, he'll travel the eastern U.S., breaking Gingerbread Lane into four villages: one in Maryland, one in New York, one in Connecticut, and one in Orlando, FL.
Until then, the houses multiply like rabbits all over his own home, taking over the basement, kitchen, and upstairs bedroom. He's worked out a system, organizing parts of the rooms by village, so it's easier to pack them up and travel to each spot. Still, with four cats at home - and battling the elements, like the rainy day when we visited - he's not immune to the occasional setback.
"My favorite is when I'm sitting down in the basement, working on a piece, and you just hear something fall," he said. "I've got 1,200 houses down there. What fell? How am I going to figure out where it is? How am I going to get it back on?"
He runs dehumidifiers regularly, to keep the gingerbread from crumbling, and he travels with bags and bags of pre-made frosting to fix any accidents that happen along the way. It's a labor of love, but the end result - the reactions he gets from the people who visit his displays - makes it well worth it.
"I love people watching," he explained. "I like to see what they like, what they don't like. Sometimes I'll wait to introduce myself, or I'll hang back and not introduce myself, just so I can see things from their perspective."
Where To Find Gingerbread Lane This Year:
New York Hall Of Science in Corona, NY; Dec. 1-Jan. 15
Maryland Science Center in Baltimore, MD; Nov. 11-Jan. 6
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