Smitty the Gingerbread Man

On the second of December, 2006, at the sixteenth annual Festival of Lights, Smithville baked a gingerbread man weighing 1,308 pounds and eight ounces and measuring twenty feet from head to toe. It took 750 pounds of flour, 49 gallons of molasses and 72 dozen eggs, and it was baked outdoors over a dump truck load of charcoal, because no oven in the county was remotely large enough. To satisfy the Guinness adjudicators the finished cookie then had to be raised by crane to an angle of sixty five degrees, so that it could be seen and measured whole rather than as a shape on the ground. It worked, and it held together, which is the part nobody expected. It was a town project rather than a bakery's, assembled outdoors in front of the people who had turned up for the festival. The record stood until 2009, when IKEA broke it in Norway. It remains the largest gingerbread man ever baked in the United States. The town retired the enormous steel cookie sheet it had been baked on, stood it upright, and turned it into a monument, dedicated at the eighteenth Festival of Lights on the sixth of December, 2008. The crowd named it Smitty by acclamation the following year. Smitty stands in a small grassy courtyard beside the chamber of commerce at Main and North First, twenty feet of painted metal with a name tag on his chest reading hello, my name is Smitty. He is one of the more cheerful roadside monuments in Texas and takes about four minutes to visit.