[soft music]
- Okay, you hold the cart and I'll pick it up, okay?
- Woman: Hopefully it'll make it.
Whew!
[whimsical music]
- You got it? - Mm-hmm.
- Okay.
- All right, ready?
You gon' push?
- Grove Park Inn is home
to the National Gingerbread House Competition.
What began 20 years ago
as a small regional exhibition has now become nationally known,
and people come from far and wide to see these
incredible, magical creations.
- And then look in right here for me.
[camera flashing] And then look in right here.
- They spend a lot of time
putting these gingerbread houses together.
And, you know, they're works of art.
They really, really are.
And their creativity, where they get some of their ideas,
it's amazing.
- My mother-in-law is Chinese.
We're very, very close.
And I just wanted to make a replica
of what it would look like in the village
where she grew up, where she was born,
shrink it down, just pay respect to her, you know.
[whimsical music]
- I got the idea for this because for every year,
my family and I would watch Muppets Christmas Carol.
And so I just drew the inspiration from that.
And it's kind of like an homage to my childhood.
[whimsical music]
- Look at the texture in the inside.
- Yes, it looks very nice. - There's a lot of work here.
- Yes, yes, I like the shape of it.
Aesthetically, I like the design of the piece.
- Mm-hmm.
- You know, and you can see the bricks
are all different integrated colors.
So that's obviously good.
- There's a little cake in here. - Yes.
- Yeah, I'm impressed with this one.
I mean, it looks real.
I mean, look at the detail, the ring, the coins.
- Yeah, well, the hands on this guy
are a little small for me.
It's a minor, minor imperfection.
- At this level.
I have never actually seen Three Wise Men
done in gingerbread either; this is the first one.
- Gingerbread is a traditional holiday decorating technique.
It started out with houses,
but now it's become all kinds of sculptures and things,
but they traditionally are a holiday theme.
- The idea of doing a Christmas tree out of gingerbread
really appealed to me.
So then I had to figure out the engineering of it.
There are about 150 gingerbread cookies.
I used a rubber stamp to get the texture on the top
and then painted them with an edible paint.
And then I began trying to stack it
so it would look like a real tree.
- We've had gingerbread houses that look like artworks.
We've had gingerbread houses that look like famous buildings.
Every year,
we're surprised by what people enter into the contest.
- I like the old-fashioned buttons.
- Yeah, yeah.
And this I think is great.
Each page in the book is there.
- Colette: Uh-huh.
We have a lot of rules.
Everything has to be edible, every single thing.
And it has to be 75% gingerbread.
- For the last eight months, I've been studying sugar.
I made the jars by building a mold out of silicone,
and I cooked sugar and poured the sugar
into those molds.
The lace, it's a frosting that's really flexible.
This is potato starch paper.
I scanned in the images and I printed
with food colors in a printer.
- What I think makes a really good gingerbread house
is not only perfect technique,
but also something that pulls you in and tells a story.
Here you have this cat, who is so, sort of scruffy.
Look at his fur,
look at the kind of crooked whiskers he's got.
And then he's looking at himself in the mirror,
in the middle of all this beauty, pins,
and brooches and bracelets.
- And all of these ruffles and bows
and edible glitter on here.
But this is one of the more you look at,
the more you see.
It's perfection, it's wonderful.
I mean, they're all just sensational.
- Announcer: Child category, top ten winners.
From Black Mountain, North Carolina,
Top ten, Youth Division.
From Gainesville, Georgia.
From Greenback, Tennessee.
- Congratulations.
Smile for me, ready?
- Announcer: Top ten winner, adult category.
- Ronald: To see the passion in those gingerbread houses,
It's awe-inspiring.
It really is.
- Announcer: Let's give a big round of applause
to all of our top ten winners in the adult category.
- You can just imagine the amount of competition,
but, hey, I make no bets on the winners.
- It's a surprise to us sometimes who the winners are.
- Yeah.
- Announcer: And now, the grand prize winner of the
20th annual National Gingerbread House Competition is,
Entry number A 1-11 from Cary, North Carolina.
[audience applauding]
- Everybody here is doing this because of love.
Love for the craft, love for the people,
the pleasure that this brings to people
that they care about.
God knows we don't do it for the money. [laughing]
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