BRETT WESTFALL
UNK students from all types of organizations, and also individually, signed up and attended the Loper Programming and Activities Council’s gingerbread house contest. Teams were allowed thirty minutes to assemble the best gingerbread house to present before the judges.
“We had 26 teams sign up this year,” said Emma Thede, a math education major from St. Paul, Nebraska. “After they are finished, whether in the 30 minutes or before, they will be judged by Abbi Hanson, a residence Hall coordinator, Brette Ensz with the First Year Program and Lisa Mendoza with student affairs.” Emma Thede is one of the heads of LPAC that helped set up this year’s competition.
During the judging process, students’ gingerbread house creations were judged by three categories. “The students are judged on creativity and originality, the overall affect and then the workmanship,” Thede said.
All products that the teams could use had to be edible, so hefty jars of peanut butter and marshmallow biproducts were used to have the graham cracker walls stand upright. Thede said that if a team used an ingredient that was not meant for eating, the judges would take off some points that would put the team out of the race. Each team in the competition this year used edible products.
“We are going to be building an oversized log cabin out of graham crackers, those longer pretzel sticks and an oversized jar of peanut butter,” said Brenner Keane, a junior at UNK. “We have four people on our team; it’s just my two good friends and my girlfriend. It looked fun, so we signed up,” Keane continued.
During the 30-minute building process, LPAC members walked around to glance at the progress teams were making, as well as to ensure that everyone used edible products. There was Christmas music played throughout the Ponderosa Room, and some LPAC members asked Christmas trivia to anyone who wanted to answer.
“$150 is what first place will get, and being college students, that would be pretty nice,” Keane said. Based on the rules, second place gets $100, and third place gets $50. All the money awarded is split among the team members.
“We added a blue frosting ‘UNK’ on the top of our little cabin and I hope that will probably help with our spirit points,” said junior Cy Cannon. Cannon’s team went on to win the competition and receive the $150 grand prize. LPAC had another successful year for the gingerbread house competition, and it will be held again next year.
