Randy Howell excitedly read the instructions posted on the outside of the intricately decorated gingerbread house. Yes, you can touch. It’s encouraged. 

“Honey, come here,” he said to his wife as he picked up a small purple jawbreaker and dropped it through the chimney. 

A few seconds later, it spit out the front, landing in a rainbow pile of other jawbreakers.

“That was interactive as heck,” he said. “I would hate to get the candy jammed in the chimney.” 

This house, the winner of the Best Holiday Spirit Award at Boothbay Harbor’s annual Gingerbread Spectacular at the Opera House, was designed and built by Rimar Reed. 

Reed, of Southport, has been making gingerbread houses for nearly 10 years, coming a long way from when she used a kit in her first competition. 

“My ultimate goal is to win most spectacular,” she said. 

The Gingerbread Spectacular, a time-honored competition for the past 19 years, draws novice and professional bakers from near and far. For three days, Dec. 12-14, the entries were on display in the historic opera house. Volunteers with Friends of the Opera House ran a raffle and sold their own baked goods to raise money for its programming.

Reed’s entry was a house with a center building flanked by two wings, the roofs decorated with rainbow icing hearts. The magic of the edible slide is kept behind the closed gingerbread door.

It takes a steady hand – and a lot of patience – to turn cookies into masterpieces. Reed is one of many Mainers who are dedicated creators of elaborate gingerbread houses too beautiful to just pinch off a wall and take a bite without at least a pang of regret.

Reed started preparing her house more than a month ago, first with a paper prototype. The ramp inside gave her the biggest headache. At first, the cracker slide was too steep, making the jawbreakers shoot out the front door too fast. Sometimes the candy got stuck on the bubbles of dried melted sugar, so she used her husband’s Dremel tool to smooth it out. She contemplated asking her architect friends for help. 

The week before the competition, Reed stayed up until 1 or 2 each morning, making sure her creation was functional and pretty. A toothpick was her tool of choice, and she made frequent trips to the grocery store to pick up more powdered sugar. She spent three hours alone making the letters to spell “candy shed.” 

“It all requires a lot of patience,” she said. And it’s sometimes dangerous. She wore long sleeves and pants when working with melted burnt sugar. “I figured there would be less exposed skin for the lava to attach itself to me,” she said. 

At Boothbay’s competition alone, there was a cookie recreation of the Harbor Theater, with gingerbread men inside watching the movie “White Christmas;” a gingerbread barn with gingerbread sheep in a pen, keeping warm with wooly coats of marshmallows; and a two-story inn with bay windows, a porch and a sugary kitten curled up on the front stoop. 

The winner of this year’s Most Spectacular Award was an elaborate under-the-sea scene with a cathedral-like castle with multiple towers, rock candy Christmas trees and a gingerbread merperson emerging from a cookie clamshell. 

Wendy Bellows, of Boothbay Harbor, was one of the four judges for this year’s spectacular. The night before the public viewing, she made multiple laps around the festively decorated opera house, clipboard in hand, taking note of the details. 

“When I saw what everyone made, it made me want to bake,” she said. 

Bellows has been making gingerbread houses for twenty years, and has honed her craft over time. 

When making her dough, Bellows adds more flour than what the recipe recommends. “You want the gingerbread to be like cement,” she said. And you always want to bake on parchment paper so you don’t have to chisel the cookie off the pan, she advised. 

Bellows always uses royal icing, or egg whites and sugar. “I beat the heck out of it until you can’t beat it anymore,” she said. It keeps throughout the construction process, which can take her up to two weeks. She works for a couple of hours every day to give the icing plenty of time to dry. 

Her favorite part is decorating. Cereals make for great roofs, and melted Jolly Ranchers create beautiful stained glass windows. 

Jessica Bailey, of Rockport, is another expert gingerbread maker who gets creative with her decorating materials. 

Pretzels of various shapes make great logs for cabins. Sprigs of rosemary make great wreaths and plants. Tootsie Rolls are convincing building posts. This year, she experimented with gum as roof shingles and building siding. She saves the stale candy to reuse every year. 

“Everything has to be edible, but I probably wouldn’t eat it,” she said. 

Bailey started making gingerbread houses every year with her children and step-children when they were small. “I became more passionate than the kids,” she said.

Ten years later, they’re all grown, but she’s still making gingerbread houses. When the United Midcoast Charities launched its gingerbread house competition the second year she lived in Rockport, she eagerly entered.

She won the people’s choice award for a colonial-style house her first year and first place for her cookie recreation of two storefronts in downtown Camden in the competition’s second year. She defended her crown this year, earning first place in the adult professional category for her sugary interpretation of Camden’s Snowbowl. 

She decorates all of her pieces before assembly, while they lay flat. It can be stressful, she said, making sure things don’t get smushed in the process. She puts a lot of faith in the soup and bean cans that prop up the walls while she waits for the icing to dry. 

Some builders are primarily focused on the structure. Father-daughter duo Allie Mayer and Bill Morgner have been making to-scale gingerbread houses since Allie was in junior high. They’ve made models of their friends’ and neighbors’ houses in Damariscotta, googling dimensions or even trespassing to collect the measurements. 

“It’s kind of more like diorama modeling than a straight-up gingerbread house,” Morgner said. 

Mayer is an architect now, and she’s been drawing their gingerbread house plans since she was a kid. “It’s been part of my educational experience,” she said. It’s a fun math problem, and they go through lengths to keep everything to scale, she said.

Last year was the first time the pair entered a competition, the Now You’re Cooking Gingerbread Contest in Bath. They made an Irish farmhouse with a thatched roof made of spaghetti. They even made a chocolate horse to fit in the stall – to scale, of course. 

Other builders, like Susan Brackett, of Boothbay Harbor, love experimenting. She’s been making gingerbread creations for more than 25 years, and she’s expanded beyond buildings. She made a grandfather clock, a stained glass window and a mad hatter. A toilet paper roll decorated with edible paper. An igloo made of sugar cubes. Skis made of fruit roll-ups.

“I like to get creative with it,” she said. 

She encourages beginners to think creatively and be patient with themselves.

“Don’t expect to make it really quickly,” she said. “Let it take time.”