By Gretchen Webster

WESTPORT — Four adults were earnestly pasting candies on gingerbread houses, using white frosting for glue. 

Meticulously placing tiny candies on culinary structures to represent cobblestones, roof tiles or other architectural features, they were crafting replicas of historic Westport buildings in gingerbread. 

Some of the decorators — all of them volunteers and staff members of the Westport Museum for History and Culture — spent hours crafting the new exhibit, Gingerbread Westport. 

The gingerbread buildings will be a featured display at the museum’s fourth annual “Jingle Bell Rock and Outdoor Winter Market” on Dec. 4.

The free event, also featuring vendors and available gift wrapping, is set from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Saturday, Dec. 4., on the museum grounds, 25 Avery Place.

“Everything is edible … but we’re not eating it,” said Kathy Nixon, a long-time volunteer and now a staff member at the museum. She was working on a gingerbread model of the old Town Hall building. 

Nicole Carpenter, the museum’s program and collections director, was preparing a gingerbread version of the Westport Sanitarium, a health facility located on a site that now is Winslow Park until it was torn down in 1973. 

The gingerbread house project started as a contest last year, said Ramin Ganeshram, the executive director of the museum. A gingerbread model of the museum’s Bradley-Wheeler House headquarters was the first-place winner last year. Each year, the prize-winning house will be added to the gingerbread collection, she said.

The museum’s outdoor market was a success last year as COVID limited inside events, she added. This year, the event will take place both outside and inside the museum, and in addition to the gingerbread display, will feature a fire pit, vendors and artists, a wrapping station for gifts — and Santa.

Greg Poretta, a museum board member at the recent gingerbread “construction” workshop, was adding finishing touches to a replica of the Greens Farms meeting house. The meeting house, which was burned in 1779 during the Revolutionary War, once stood on the current site of the Greens Farms Church.

Poretta was clearly enjoying himself as he stuck glistening pearl candies to the meeting house roof. “I’m having fun,” he said. “Each day, I can’t wait to get to the museum and work on this.”

For more information, contact the Westport Museum for History and Culture at 203-222-1424.