Although ‘light up’ is about the lights and the large Thursday kick off, there are other visions that go a long way in making Ladysmith’s Festival of Lights a great community event.
One of the attractions that gathers huge attention for weeks is the annual gingerbread creation that’s featured in the window of the town’s famous Old Town Bakery. Head baker, Geoff Cram, half of the ownership team of Geoff and Kate Cram, came up with the idea of creating an eye-catching gingerbread creation he said “around 2007 or maybe ‘06 or ‘05 it’s been almost 20 years.”
Cram has, in previous years, done a separate creation for the Wild Poppy Bistro and their gelato store at the conference centre in Nanaimo.
“This year I’m only doing the one for the bakery. I had surgery earlier this past September so it’s laid me up for a couple of weeks.”
Cram said that he normally does a template from cut-out cardboard in the beginning of September and then bakes all the gingerbread towards the end of the month.
“With the size of the gingerbread, about 80 pounds, I let it dry for almost the whole month of October,” he said. “It shrinks quite a bit. It can loose a quarter of an inch, and the bigger pieces I make, some being 16 by 24 inches, can lose up to three-quarters of an inch in shrinkage,” he added. “With that amount of loss, we don’t want the structures to collapse. While on display the structures get a lot of humidity in the bakery and then with the ovens on they can dry out awfully quickly. I usually start the actual construction of the piece right after Halloween as a lot of the extras and stuff have had some of the decorating, etc. done on them, while the gingerbread itself has been drying. The icing doesn’t change shape or shrink, it just stays hard, so we don’t want the gingerbread to shrink or the icing just starts to fall off.
“Our pieces stay out in the window from the middle of November until usually the end of January, but depending on the piece, we have had them on display until Valentines Day.”
Along with all the ingredients for the gingerbread Cram said he uses more than 50 pounds of sugar in the annual creations. There have been varied themes of gingerbread creations over the years and in 2019 Cram did a Coast Salish big house with a mountain shaped like a bird and a moon. The piece also featured gingerbread people in Cowichan sweaters.
“This year I thought about doing an advent calendar with 24 individual buildings but once I started designing it, it just didn’t seem to fit, so for now that’s on the back burner.”
For 2023 Cram did Santa’s work shop at the North Pole.
“That was the second time I had done a North Pole feature,” he said. “Both times I’ve never done anything with the elves, so this year it will be a structure from the elves’ point of view. I will have features of how they would reside as well as get around the North Pole.”
“Kate and I have wanted to do a European trip and view some of the various structures from different eras, such as a bridge in Florence called the Ponte Vecchio and then there’s the North Pole, from the Norwegian aspect, which is where Kate is from. I haven’t been there, but she has and she wants to take me back there,” Cram said. “The trip hasn’t happened yet, but I hope it’s getting closer.”
Unfortunately for folks who want to see the actual construction of the piece, “that is all done upstairs,” Cram said. “Most is done after I finish my regular work at the bakery or in Nanaimo and on weekends and evenings. It will take, probably, two weeks to build all the pieces together. This one will have the most pieces I’ve ever done on any of the structures and each one has to have the sugar icing decorating done to them.”
The final preparation will be done on the final weekend, probably before Light Up.
“We will take the almost finished pieces downstairs and then I will be adding the final pieces and decorating,” Cram said. “When that’s all done we’ll turn it around and place it in the bakery’s front window.
“Two years ago I did a Christmas train, which was in the window of the Wild Poppy. It was actually the second time I had done a train. The first one, was when our son, Seth, was really small and he was really into the show Polar Express. I was looking at photos of that piece, from back then, and decided that I wanted to do it again but I wanted to do it better. There is always a challenge and I find that intriguing,” he said.
The bakery has featured other structures such as ones for Halloween and other events, but this will be the only one for 2024.
Cram said he has no idea how many hours his creations take.
“I will come in and do some icing, I’ll do a little bit at a time and then go onto another project.”
Cram is the only one in the bakery that does all the decorating on the sugar cookies and other type of products, “so I have to fit it into when I have, or make, the time. This year’s piece has a lot finer decorating and more finer pieces so I’ve had to really get my act together. Normally, I can be a bit rougher of the decorating and throw a lot of candy on it and it all looks grand, but this one will be different,” he said.
If you want to see this year's creation in person, head to the Old Town Bakery in Ladysmith to see it in all its gingerbread glory.
