Today, and every year on this date, we celebrate National Gingerbread Cookie Day. which most people believe to be the real start of the holiday season - or at least the baking one.
Gingerbread is a bit like marmite in many ways, some people hate it and others are huge fans. The trick to getting someone who swears they hate it is to try them with the soft, or rather older, gingerbread, rather than the very newly baked and hard variety. I must admit I prefer my gingerbread, and ginger products, soft, so I buy a packet of ginger nut biscuits and leave them out of the packet in a bowl. Or I used to, before a mouse decided to move in with me, and bring their friends, because it turns out that they like ginger as well, which leads to soft ginger nut biscuits but with the edges nibbled and the bowl surrounded by crumbs...
The history of the gingerbread cookie is debatable. Its earliest recorded origin is when an Armenian monk called Gregory of Nicopolis turned up in France and started teaching their bakers how to make ginger bread, or rather ginger cakes. That was about the tenth century. We also know that Queen Elizabeth the First held a famous party at which her chefs created little men from gingerbread and decorated them to look like her guests. This is the first appearance of the gingerbread man, which, in actual fact is also a cookie, a cookie simply being a biscuit, perhaps round but more often shaped.
As for the World`s Largest Gingerbread Man this has developed over time.
The one on our card was made on November the 19th, 2003, at the Hyatt Regency Hotel in Vancouver, Canada. He weighed over 372 pounds, and measured thirteen feet eleven inches high, five foot eight inches wide and two inches deep.
He seems to have been beaten by one made on December the 2nd, 2006, at the sixteenth annual Festival of Lights celebration in Smithville, Texas, which weighed 1,308 lbs, 8 oz and measured 20 feet from head-to-toe.
That was beaten by one weighing 1,435 pounds, which was made by the staff of an IKEA store in Oslo, Norway on November the 9th, 2009 - and which remains the record at time of typing.