Guinness World Record Holding GingerBread Exhibit on Display at New York Hall of Science

Jon Lovitch is like a kid in a candy shop when talking about his gingerbread creation. His gingerbread village takes him all year to make and contains 600 lbs of gingerbread, 800 lbs of candy and 5000 lbs of icing.

Lovitch holds the Guiness World Record for the largest gingerbread village in the world. This year the exhibit, called Gingerbread Lane, contains over 1,300 houses on three tiers in the New York Hall of Science.

The planning for the decadent masterpiece takes all year. In January, Lovitch starts sketching out schematics for the village as if he’s creating a real town. “On the two sides it’s more residential and up top there’s more little single houses and then as you get lower the houses get nicer,” he said. “Then as you get to the bottom two levels you have more of what I call the commerce section of Gingerbread Lane, the shops. One of the rules Guinness World Records dictates with the village, is that it has to be at least ten percent commercial.”

Those commercial shops all have whimsical names of Lovitch’s own creation. There’s the “Not a Creature was Stirring Chimney Sweep Service,” “The Eight Maids a Milking Milk Bar” and the “Pumpkin Spice Latte Coffee Shop”. For next year, Lovitch is already planning the “Eleven Pipers Piping Piping Hot Soup Store”. He takes inspiration from everywhere, including his family. This year, for the first time the village has a toy store in honor of Lovitch’s new baby.

Lovitch wants the gingerbread displays to spark conversations among the families who visit.  He sneaks in references to Christmases past so the kids will ask their parents what certain shops mean. There is the “Radio Flyer Sled Shop” and the “It Came Upon a Midnight Clear Clockshop”. “The kids are the best because the reactions you get from the kids range anywhere from ‘oh my god,’ to ‘wow look,’ and it’s pretty cool to see them pointing with that big open mouth,” he said.

At the center of the village is an eye catching shop with a sculpture on top of it. It features Santa Claus in his sleigh with a rogue reindeer.  According to Lovitch, the sculpture weighs in at roughly 28 lbs.

Everything in Lovitch’s village is completely edible and made from only three ingredients - gingerbread, icing and candy. This is a requirement for Lovitch to enter the Guinness World Record competition. But one problem Lovitch surprisingly does not usually face is bugs. He said the aromatic spices in gingerbread keep the bugs away.

Even if he did not enter the competition, he would still stick to these ingredients. When Lovitch first started making gingerbread houses 26 years ago, he entered a competition and lost. The other bakers used fondant, rice crispy treats and marzipan.

The very next year Lovitch created his very first village. “I loved right away the reaction people had to it,” he said. “People were taking pictures of it and looking at it for 15 or 20 minutes and it was only 12 houses and they were looking for that long at a small village and I fell in love with the romantic side of that. I was like this is really cool, people really like this, and it just kept growing and growing.”

Near the display sits what Lovitch calls the 40 year-old house. It was given to him in 2014 by a man who made it in 1976 with his wife. After she passed away he wanted the house to have a permanent home. Every year Lovitch repairs it and uses it as an example of how long the gingerbread creations can last.

At the end of the season everything from Gingerbread Lane is given away. Members of the public line up on the exhibit’s last day to take home a piece of the Christmas season. This year the exhibit will close on January 21st.

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Gingerbread Lane is on display at The New York Hall of Science until January 21st.

Tickets and information here.