CENTRE HALL — It looked like an aerial view of a housing development, with rows of houses adorned with brightly colored Christmas decorations and pine trees in the front yards. But the houses were made of gingerbread, decorated by students in pre-kindergarten through fourth grade at Centre Hall-Potter Elementary School who gathered in the school gymnasium to make the sweet abodes Dec. 18.
Students entered the gym by grade and took turns decorating their creations in shifts of about 45 minutes each throughout the school day. School staff personnel and adult volunteers helped guide the students, who used candy, pretzels, cereal and plenty of green and white icing to create their masterpieces.
The gingerbread house project was originated by Keith and Heather Luse seven years ago. They operate Delectable Delights, a cake, cookie and pastry business in Centre Hall, and Heather Luse also is a pastry chef at Penn State. The Luses made gingerbread houses for their daughter Isabella’s playschool class at Grace United Methodist Church, then decided to extend the project to include the entire elementary school.
The Luses supplied the schools with 300 gingerbread house kits, purchased from Wegman’s in State College. They donated nearly 500 pounds of green and white icing, and a group of parents spent several hours assembling and mounting the houses on plywood bases. Heather Luse said the parent-teacher group and individual donations fund the decoration items, which her husband buys throughout the year at post-holiday sales, overstock and surplus sales and wherever he can find them.
The students’ showed great creativity and imagination at all grade levels. Inverted ice cream cones covered with green icing became Christmas trees, rows of gumdrops made hedges around houses and shredded wheat became thatched roofing.
The houses were on public display from 3 to 6 p.m., after which the students could take them home to be enjoyed.
