Instead, I say, ‘Mum did tell me to keep it simple, that’s what people want. Patrick, do you know where to get, like, two hundred candles?’
He looks at his watch then nods assuredly.
‘I’ll be back in a while,’ he says, striding away.
‘So we’re going back to basics?’ Izz asks, excitement in her voice.
‘I think so,’ I tell her, closing the notebook. ‘Something more heartfelt.’
‘Doing it for the ’gram?’ one of the mums asks as she ties on her apron.
‘Actually, no,’ I say gently. ‘Let’s do it for us. For Wheaton. And our beautiful hall. And for my mum, and all the kiddies,’ I say.
‘All right, then. You heard the boss,’ says Izz. ‘But it’s half-two already and there’s still hours of work ahead of us. Even on a normal year it could take us twenty-four hours or longer to assemble the whole display.’
‘And we have…?’ asks Fern.
‘Until bedtime,’ I tell her. ‘But we’ve got our images from Bergen as inspiration, we’ve got the people power, we’re…’
I’m halted in delivering the end of my inspirational pep talk by the arrival of Sully. He’s carefully ferrying his own creations made this morning at the bakery.
‘I’ll unpack them over here,’ he says, finding a spot in the corner.
‘Well, you all know what to do,’ I say, giving up with a grin. ‘Action stations.’
We’ve been working for a good hour and the school bell’s rung and all the kids have screeched and laughed their way off school grounds. Tomorrow’s their last day of term and you can feel the anticipation in their retreating chatter.
The traffic noise dies away too. I only notice it when it’s gone and we’re left with the total silence of us shuffling gingerbread builds into place and tearing off hunks of white fluffy stuff from a roll to make the snowy landscapes around them.
Patrick returns with a big box of battery-operated tealights and sets to work again on building the grotto area.
It’s dark outside when Mrs Slaughter appears at the hall doors. At first, I think she’s going to ask us to leave so she can lock up, which makes my heart pound, we’re nowhere near finished. But instead, she summons me, Patrick and Izz out of the gym’s fire doors and into the car park. ‘Delivery for you,’ she says. ‘These all need signing for.’
There, by the school gates, is a red Royal Mail van, and piled by its open doors are umpteen boxes of all shapes and sizes, and all of them, it turns out, are addressed to The Gingerbread Christmas Village, Wheaton. A few of them say they’re for Izz in particular. All of them are markedFragile.
Once we get them inside, the little crowd of volunteers gathers once more to watch us ripping the tape on the first box, Sully perching beside me on the ground.
I lift out a letter from the top of a bubble-wrapped package. I read the note aloud. ‘For the Wheaton gingerbread grotto. We hope this arrives in one piece, with best wishes, from the Wheaton bakery, Nebraska!’
‘No way!’ Shell’s eyes goggle. Fern reaches for the letter, checking it over.
‘That’s one of Wheaton’s twinned villages,’ Izz informs us, and I cut short the expressions of amazement by gently removing the bubble wrap from the Nebraskan bakery’s traditional candy-covered house with a gingerbread animal leaning against its beautifully iced front panel.
Lolla gasps. ‘Is that a moose?’
‘It’s some kind of deer,’ I say, peering closely. ‘With a little white tail. Isn’t it beautiful?’
Patrick takes the build in silent astonishment and carries it to a display table, and then we all fall to opening the other boxes.
‘Just like Christmas morning!’ one of Sully’s delivery men remarks.
In minutes we’ve revealed gingerbread creations from all across the globe, from libraries, baking clubs, book groups, societies and sororities. I keep every letter and postcard so they can be displayed with their creation. Every one is lifted onto a table in the exhibit. At first, Lucy directs their placement, separating the builds out into roughly themed areas.
She says, ‘The waterfall-and-rocks scene from Cork should sit there on the wild table with the Nebraska house and all those reindeer biscuits on their little stands from the Cairngorms.’
Sully takes the multi-coloured IKEA building that made us all laugh in delight when we pulled it from the box – sent from a Swedish school after the kids voted for the subject matter, according to their teacher’s letter – and he places it with an Eiffel Tower and an understated, not-at-all-to-scale-with-everything-else Little Mermaid from Copenhagen. And it doesn’t matter one bit that increasingly, there’s little rhyme or reason to their placement.
‘Think of the Pepperkakebyen,’ I say. ‘People from all over Norway send in their builds to Bergen. It hardly matters if they’re not all the same size or style, does it? It’s how it feels that’s important.’
