30 Nov 2021 The traveling gingerbread house

By Morgan Zimmerman

What began as a need for a centerpiece 45 years ago has become an annual tradition of smiles and fun for dozens of children. Susan Farris bakes an authentic, German gingerbread house each November to usher in the holiday season and bring the smell of Christmas to her home.

After graduating from UCA in 1969 with a consumer science degree, Farris was working in Little Rock as a home economist coordinator for the Arkansas Louisiana Gas Co. sales department. As an HEC, she would teach people how to cook with the natural gas appliances that her company sold.

“We would teach large cooking classes — kind of like Rachel Ray does now,” Farris said. “Sometimes women would call us to do programs in their homes. We might do a dozen recipes in one night!”

She and her teaching partner decided a gingerbread house would make the perfect centerpiece for an in-home holiday program they were organizing. Susan had never made a gingerbread house before, so she reached out to her sister-in-law, a German teacher at an area high school, who found a recipe with a pattern in one of her German books. “I make the same house every year, and I still use the same recipe and the same cardboard pattern my husband, Bob, made more than 45 years ago,” Farris said.

She mentioned one exception. “In 2018, we visited France with my grandchildren, and my granddaughter, Ellie, was obsessed with Paris. So, that year, I had my husband make a template for the Eiffel Tower that Ellie and my grandson, Max, decorated.”

The Farris’ gingerbread house has become a tradition for Susan and her family over the years, but the project has touched so many more people than her four children and five grandchildren. She bakes and assembles the gingerbread house before Thanksgiving every year. Most years, it would travel to her parent’s home in Northwest Arkansas where all of the children would get to add a decoration. When her kids were in school, the gingerbread house would make the journey to their classrooms, where each student could add their own special touch.

“I remember having in my mind that their decorations would be perfect, like when I used to decorate the entire thing before I had kids, but of course it wasn’t,” Farris said. “It would return home with suckers hung upside down and candies stuck in all sorts of unusual places.”

Now that her children are grown, Susan’s daughter, Leah, has become chair of the decorating committee. She makes the icing and gathers the children at Thanksgiving and has even taken it to where she works so that more kids can join in the fun. The decorations range from vanilla wafer shingles to Kit Kat shutters and everything in between.

“People can be so creative,” Farris said. “One year at the kids’ school, a teacher sprinkled granulated sugar over it to make it sparkle, and I thought, ‘I would never have thought of that!’” She added, “The kids always want to eat the candy.” But she said that she doesn’t recommend it because some of the candy has been in the pantry for years. “I buy it up after Christmas, and anything we don’t use goes right back into the pantry for next year.” Her favorite decoration is candy canes because she “doesn’t like to eat those anyway.”

The recipe that Susan follows is fairly easy to make and doesn’t require any unusual ingredients or tools. “Anyone can make it, you just need a big jelly roll pan and a sharp knife,” Farris said. She added that a good tip is to cut it while it’s hot because after it cools, it’s too hard to cut.

Each season, after the gingerbread house has made its rounds to be decorated and bring smiles to children, it usually finds a place on Susan’s desk. “I leave it by my computer, and throughout the season every time I sit down, it smells like Christmas.”