Sugar, spice and everything nice for used for Saint John’s village
By Daily Press staff
A fully constructed Saint John’s hospital was unveiled last week.
The gingerbread version, that is. In the hospital’s main lobby is a massive gingerbread village that extends 12 feet by 12 feet. It required 48 sheet pans of gingerbread, 200 pounds of powered sugar and hours of work by the hospital’s executive chef Bill Sharp and his helpers, including his daughter, 10-year-old Mariah Sharp. Sharp began working on the village, which has a replica of the new hospital and a “Cat In The Hat” theme, shortly after Thanksgiving. The village took two and a half weeks to create, before it was unveiled on Dec. 15.
The gingerbread village has been a tradition at Saint John’s for eight years, and each year it gets more extravagant. The first one only had eight houses and a church. This year, it takes up nearly half of the hospital lobby and sits on four large pieces of plywood.
“It’s a good-sized bedroom,” Sharp said. “We tried to go a little whimsical this year.”
Sharp began the task by creating a floor plan, then cut out templates of the buildings from large sheet pans, which required eight cases of gingerbread mix. Once the templates were created, the platform and stage were built. Then came the fun part — decorating the houses and buildings with icing and candy.
The village’s anchor building is a model of the 225,000-square-foot inpatient building, which after four years of construction is scheduled to be done in May.
“I give credit to Bill,” joked Terry Muldoon, who oversees the construction of the new hospital. “He built the hospital a lot faster than me.”
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on December 24, 2003. Read the original PDF.