What do holiday celebrations look like in a year defined by loss and isolation?
In St. Andrews, a small town on the southwestern tip of New Brunswick, the annual gingerbread competition captured a complicated kind of joy with the winning entry for adult participants.
“Together Apart,” the gingerbread house entry by guidance counsellor Caleigh Dunfield and her boyfriend Chris Langille, features not just a single gingerbread house, but a gingerbread village, decorated with icing and candy glass.
“You are strong, you are brave, you are loved,” it says in the background, in gingerbread letters outlined with icing. The scene is capped off with messages of hope from St. Andrews residents.
It’s on display in the window of the Treadwell Inn, where Langille works as a chef.
The display has been getting a lot of attention since it first went up last Saturday, said Christy Kennedy, who owns the inn with her husband AJ. She said she’s received a “flood” of message about the display, both in person and on social media.
“People have said not just ‘This is a great thing,’ but also just how much it’s meant to them,” she said. She particularly likes the notes strung up above the gingerbread houses — some provide hope, other reassure people that it’s OK if they’re feeling defeated.
“I sent them to my family out West, and my mom wrote me saying, ‘Please thank Chris and Caleigh, because we’re just sitting reading these, tears rolling down our faces.’”
“There’s one that says, ‘If you’re reading this right now, take a deep breath, roll your shoulders back, take your tongue off the roof of your mouth, and breathe,’” Kennedy said. “I’d watch people reading it and doing exactly that, throw their shoulders back and just take a deep breath. It was really neat to watch.”
Although New Brunswick is part of the “Atlantic bubble,” which has been pretty effective at limiting COVID-19 cases, St. Andrews — with a population of about 1,800 people — hasn’t been immune from the devastating effects of the pandemic.
“We’ve had a lot of families here who have lost some people,” Kennedy said.
For Dunfield, who estimates she and Langille spent approximately 16 hours creating the gingerbread village, the project was an expression of her love for her hometown.
“One of the things that I love about being from a small town is that everybody is like your extended family,” Dunfield told HuffPost Canada. “In a normal year, because we see everybody out and about, we share our highs and lows. I think, as a community, we’ve become really good at that.”
But the nature of the pandemic meant that the town couldn’t band together in the way it normally would.
“I work in mental health, and I’ve been concerned since all of this started about the impact that a sustained period of separation and isolation and uncertainty would have on people,” she said.
She was thinking about the community’s “shared grief” when she came up with the plan for the gingerbread village, she said.
“The idea came from wanting to reflect back to our community that we’re still in this together, and that’s always going to be true, even when we have to stay apart,” she explained.
She reached out to friends and community members to share uplifting messages. “Some people chose to share their favourite quotes, and others offered these beautiful messages that were in their own words,” she said. “That was probably like, my favourite part, just reading them all.”
Once she had those messages, the rest of the idea fell into place. As anyone who’s made their own gingerbread can attest to, the baking process was labour-intensive. But her boyfriend’s skill in the kitchen and Dunfield’s artistic ability (she has a photography degree) made the finished product worth it. She topped off the houses with candy glass, dehydrated fruit and pieces from a wasabi snack mix.
At night, Christmas lights behind the display light up the windows in the little houses, giving the impression of cosy interiors and drawing a visual connection between the individual houses.
Dunfield has been surprised by the reaction her gingerbread village has elicited — not just in St. Andrews, but from people from all over, who sent her messages after seeing photos online.
“It’s been lovely to see how many people have had a reaction to it,” she said. “It exceeded our expectations, which were just to do something nice to lift people up.”
Dunfield and Langille did, of course, win the prize, as voted by the community, for best gingerbread house made by adults. They donated the prize money to a food bank and a local transition house that supports women and children fleeing violence.
And she humbly insists St. Andrews residents take credit for her creation.
“I really do give credit to those messages that were offered by the community members, and less credit to my amateur piping work.”
WATCH: Here’s how you can make cute and festive gingerbread waffles: