The History of LAARC Gingerbread Houses
December 19, 2009 Blogs, Geek stuff, LAARC 
I started volunteering at LAARC back in 2003, was employed here in 2004 and have been here ever since. On a day to day basis I get to handle some of the world’s best objects. But forget all them at this time of year, as there’s one annual object that get’s me more excited than any other – the LAARC Gingerbread house!
The history of Gingerbread seems to go back over 500 years with Germanic/Swedish origins, arriving in Britain in the 1500’s and being widespread by the 1700’s. But I’m not here to write about the history of Gingerbread, but instead the Archaeological Archive’s tradition of making a Gingerbread House each Christmas.
Back in 2003, LAARC had a full time conservator, Jannicke who came from Norway. It was she who first introduced the Gingerbread house to the archive. Keeping with Scandinavian tradition, the house was decorated for Christmas and sat proudly as the centre piece at our Christmas party. Decorated with an abundance of sugary sweets, bonded together with icing sugar, it’s a dentist’s worst nightmare, but looks a dream. Its true moment of glory however, is when it gets smashed, revealing even more sweets and chocolates inside.
Ever since then, despite Jannicke leaving in 2005, we’ve kept up the tradition of decorating a house each year and along the way have watched it evolve into one of the highlights of each Christmas party.
The smashing of the house is now preceded by two events; the decorating and the competition to determine who gets to smash it. The decorating gets done by LAARC staff in a creative morning session, where we let our artistic skills flow. The competition’s vary and have previously included a Christmas caption competition, a Christmas catapult competition and a Christmas song quiz. This year, we were very lucky to have Jannicke join us at our party and as our guest of honour, she along with her 1 year old daughter and volunteer Chris (he volunteered the most this year) got to be the smashers.
We may not be as grand as the recent Obama Gingerbread WhiteHouse, but it’s a nice little tradition we have and long may it continue!