VERO BEACH — On a recent day, Pam Huff was a jewelry designer. By nightfall, Huff was a structural engineer, a construction worker and landscape architect.
The proof was on her once smart, sleek black outfit that was now specked with powder sugar and f lakes from frosting, used as a mortar for her miniature house.
“Oh look at me, I’m a mess,” she said.
Slightly distracted but not detoured, Huff forged ahead, leaning over the table and applying the finishing touches to her West Virginia, holler-style gingerbread house.
Huff readied herself that it was indeed going to be a long night because no gingerbread holler-style house is complete without the ubiquitous outhouse and cinder blocks to raise the miniature toy truck.
Faye Estes knows a thing or two about long nights.
The Little Harbor Lane woman spent more than two weeks baking gingerbread, whipping up frosting for the Girl’s Night Out Gingerbread House Decorating event hosted at her house Oct. 6.
On the day of the event, Estes was in the kitchen at 4:30 a.m. getting it ready for the 40 women who would join her first for cocktails and then some serious gingerbread decorating.
Estes’ house teemed with sugar; some 45 pounds was used to make the frosting.
Around her home, bowls brimmed with pink and blue gumballs, gummy-style candies, Red Hots, peppermints, Smarties, taffy and oodles of other sugar-laced sweets.
Jingle Bells could be heard over the giggles and groans as the women dutifully set out to woo potential fanciers of all things gingerbread for the upcoming Festival of Trees event.
“What I need are the little hands of a first-grader,” said Cheryl Burge as she struggled to keep her adult- size fingers from bumping into and knocking down the candy she was using to cover her gingerbread house.
This is the first year that the mass-production of gingerbreads houses will be on sale during the Festival of Trees gala in mid-November.
This year, as in other years, there will still be the larger scale Gingerbread Village created mostly by professional chefs and not a daytime jewelry designer turned miniature outhouse builder like Huff.
Gingerbread Village pieces will be up for action. The smaller houses built by Huff and crew will be on sale for $25 each.
The Festival of Trees is an annual fund-raising event for the Children’s Theatre, an education arm of Riverside Theatre. This year’s festival kicks off Nov. 18 when 48 Christmas trees and two dozen wreaths go on the auction block along with the Gingerbread Village pieces.
The event tends to bring in between $70,000 and $90,000 each year, said Linda Downey, Riverside Children’s Theatre education director.