Down the snowy hillside, keep your eyes peeled for SAR-Tech gummy bears dangling from a rope overtop a gingerbread house roof. There’s a helicopter sitting atop a nearby house’s gingerbread chimney. A fire truck sits beside structure fire: flames are coming out underneath the gingerbread eaves. Candy bits spell out the names and signs and hangar numbers on the other gingerbread buildings in the scene, with frosted gingerbread trees set all around.
It’s Replenishment Flight’s annual holiday display at the Annapolis Mess, set up in time for the December 8 Junior Ranks’ annual festive dinner, and December daily dining by 14 Wing Greenwood personnel.
“It’s just for fun – and it is a lot of fun,” says Master Corporal Jacquelyn Webster, who designed this year’s gingerbread vignette. “It gets people in the flight excited, and it’s a bit of a break from the regular kitchen duties. We like to do this just for Christmas.”
Flight members raised home toy boxes for the helicopter and fire truck, plus snowman, people on sleds, cars and other vehicles, and lots of other touches set in the snowy streets. Mini lights make it all glow.
“We started four weeks ago, when we started making cookies for the Junior Ranks’ dinner. Different people made the gingerbread – from scratch, of course! – cooked the house pieces off and froze the pieces. When we were ready, we used burned sugar to set the house pieces together – it holds better than icing, and it adds a bit of glitter to the houses and trees.
“We have almost every section on the wing represented here with a gingerbread house.”
