By Nick Brown
Posted: 12/10/2008 10:52:28 AM EST
ASHBURNHAM -- About 100 gingerbread houses are lining the halls at J.R. Briggs Elementary School this week to memorialize Rachel Lee, the 10-year-old fourth-grader who died in August of a brain tumor.
Students paid $2 for the right to display their models, with proceeds benefiting the Rachel Lee Memorial Fund.
"It's not a contest," said art teacher Peggy Richard, who helped plan the event. "We just wanted something that would allow kids to be original and keep Rachel's creativity alive."
Rachel Lee's mother, Leslie Lee, said her daughter loved everything from art to academics to sports. But art was her first love, she said.
"We wanted to have students do something that Rachel would have loved to do," Leslie Lee said. "We would usually make a gingerbread house every Christmas, and Rachel loved it."
She added that family members originally designed the memorial fund to benefit art in Ashburnham.
"But as we've discussed this further, we've branched it out to include everything she loved, which is a lot of things," Leslie Lee said.
She declined to say how much money the memorial fund has brought in so far, but said she hoped money could be used to benefit art and athletics programs in town this year.
Richard said the gingerbread house display has fetched about $200.
Leslie Lee stressed that keeping Rachel's memory alive isn't about money.
"The main goal was just for people to enjoy themselves in a way Rachel would have," Lee
said.
According to students interviewed Tuesday by the Sentinel & Enterprise, organizers achieved that goal.
"I like making gingerbread houses, and this is the best one I've done," said 8-year-old Celeste Gendron, a third-grader. "My favorite part was thinking about what it was going to look like."
Gendron said she rode the bus with Rachel Lee last year.
Like most houses, Gendron's model used graham crackers glued in the shape of a house, as well as frosting and other candies to represent windows, bushes and snow.
First-grader Ben Wiita, 6, named his house "Ben's Candy Land."
"My favorite part was putting the gum drops around it like a fence," Wiita said. "I also used, like, sprinkles and, like, frosting, and I made a pond and put gummy fish in it."
Wiita added that he helped his mother sprinkle coconut shavings around the outside of his house to simulate snow.
Austin Bogosian, 10, a fifth-grader, said his model "is supposed to be a candy shop."
Bogosian used peppermint candy around the windows, marshmallows as snow, and "would have used more frosting on the roof and sides, but I ran out."
"It took me about a week," Bogosian added. "I did it all myself."
Bogosian said art is among his favorite subjects, and he enjoys drawing and building.
Richard said most of the houses benefited from varying degrees of parental assistance, but she isn't complaining.
"I'm really impressed with the results," she said. "It's nice for families to come together and do something like this for a girl who was exceptionally motivated, creative and athletic."
Leslie Lee, too, said she's glad the project became an event for families to enjoy together.
"I had a few people come up to me and tell me they really liked the family time they got to spend, and now they want to do it every year," she said. "That's what we want to do. We want to give something back to the community that they can enjoy, because the community's been very good to us."