US ambassador's wife recreates Estonian textile artist's works in gingerbread
Each year, Velida Kitaina Kent and her husband George P. Kent, the current U.S. ambassador to Estonia, build elaborate gingerbread buildings and even cities. This year's masterpiece was dedicated to Estonian textile artist Anu Raud and her work.
You could call the Kents professional bakers. Each year, ahead of the holidays, they don't just make little gingerbread houses; they craft whole buildings and even entire cities out of gingerbread, making everything from the dough to the frosting themselves from scratch.
Last year, they made a gingerbread Narva. This year, Velida Kent chose to look beyond cityscapes and go for something uniquely Estonian.
"So this year's project is my 17th year," she told "Ringvaade" reporter Hannes Hermaküla. "And I decided to commemorate Anu Raud's work, because she's the leading living Estonian folk artist."
The scene even included a miniature gingerbread Anu Raud.
"This year, I thought, you know – all my pieces were basically cities," Kent explained. "Tallinn – beautiful city. But it's like Danish, Swedish, German [cities]. And to me, this is Estonian."
The gingerbread complex includes the buildings of Heimtali Museum, which is now a part of the Estonian National Museum (ERM), but was first founded by Raud at her father's farm in 1991.
It also features 17 of the textile artist's actual works. The hardest of these to recreate was the "Mother Tree," a work made from woven woolen skirts and knit gloves included in Estonian folk dress from Kihnu and Manija.
"This 'Mother Tree' is actually at the UN," the baker highlighted. "[Raud] gave it to the United Nations office, and it's in New York."
'Never seen anything like this'
Velida Kitaina Kent is Crimean Tatar. She grew up in Uzbekistan after her family was deported from Crimea in 1944.
"We didn't do any of that there," she said. But when they lived in Ukraine, she met an American woman working at the embassy who had a gingerbread house.
"I was like, 'Oh my God, what is this?'" she recalled. "And she says, 'Oh, it's a gingerbread house!' I was like, 'Wow, I've never seen anything like this.' And one day I was like, you know what? I'm gonna do a gingerbread house – I'm gonna try. And that's how I started."
Velida Kent's first gingerbread house was a little one, but with each passing year, her creations got bigger and more elaborate.
"But all of them, I have to have a connection – to a place, or people," she explained. "Because I spend about a month with this project, and I really need to like it."
The ambassador, George P. Kent, helps his wife as well.
"I get the roofs," he admitted. "I'm partly the architect. So – how high should it be, how wide should it be – I get to do the math. And then she is the artist that creates the pieces."
Once the artist is finished, he continued, someone else has to do all the extra work. "So I'm usually the one that does the grounds and the roofs," he added.
This family's passion for gingerbread goes back generations, spanning several cultures.
"I had a Swedish Chicago grandmother," the ambassador explained. "And so when I would visit her house on Christmas Eve, we would have the thin piparkook – the Swedish, Estonian tradition. My other grandmother was of German heritage, and the German, English tradition is what we call gingerbread. And it's thicker, because it has baking powder. There's the Swedish, Estonian piparkook, and the German, English gingerbread. And in my family, we made and ate both of them."
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Editor: Viktor Solts, Aili Vahtla
