Take a holiday road trip to see a Texas-sized gingerbread village this season
BY JANIS TURK
Run as fast as you can, and this year you just might catch the gingerbread man!
He’s coming to Texas this month, after all.
Yes, the ultimate gingerbread man, chef Jon Lovitch, Guinness World Records title holder for the largest entirely edible gingerbread village, is bringing his enormous gingerbread display to Santa’s Wonderland in College Station where folks can see it from Nov. 13 through Dec. 30.
There the kids can stare in slack-jawed wonder at all the marvelous Christmas surprises in store. With hay rides, horse and carriage rides, Santa’s Station cottage, a petting zoo, pony rides, holiday light displays, a toboggan chute, the West Pole Express train ride, an ice-skating rink, nightly snow flurries, and a cowboy-hat wearing Santa and Mrs. Claus, it’s a pretty spectacular holiday spot. At the heart of all the holiday fun, take time to stop and smell the gingerbread at Lovitch’s Texas-sized Gingerbread Lane display.
To create the world’s biggest gingerbread village, it takes a whole lot of sugar. In fact, Lovitch has used more than 6,000 pounds of dough, 4,500 pounds of hard candies, 8,265 pounds of icing, 1,300 pounds of gumdrops, and 15,700 candy canes since 1997 (when he first started counting).
This year, Lovitch will once again be building more than 1,251 gingerbread houses in his New York kitchen in order to make the Guinness World Records yet again. Then he will load up a sleigh full of gingerbread houses and head to Texas.
Making the world’s largest edible gingerbread village is a challenging 365-day-a-year job, but with his baby girl “Splash” and his dear wife Judy, a couple of cute feline family members by his side, and a house that smells like gingerbread year-round, Lovitch has to admit, it’s a pretty sweet life.
IF YOU GO:
Santa’s Wonderland
18898 Hwy 6
College Station, TX 77845
979.690.7212
VISIT GINGERBREAD LANE:
