White lights blinked on a life-sized dog statue next to a faux Christmas tree in the library as Co-Librarians KatieAnn Prescott and Lauren Kluck diligently prepared for their upcoming gingerbread house contest in the busy weeks of November prior to launching the event.

“I think [the contest] is good because it shows the creativity of the people here at Westwood,” Catherine Matzdorf ‘29 said. “[School’s] not just about grades. It can be fun things that show imagination and creativity.”

The gingerbread house contest is a new addition to the library’s vast collection of events. The contest encourages students and faculty to create gingerbread houses from cardboard and decorate their creations with colors and craftable materials. To encourage participation, the librarians are providing cardboard to students, along with prizes for the winning team. Carefully preparing instructions for submissions, the librarians ensured that all logistical bases were covered in anticipation for the contest and the following showcase of houses.

“We would not want any food on the cardboard gingerbread houses because we do have animals in here,” Ms. Prescott said. “They seem to find their way, and so we just want to make sure that we’re not attracting any unwanted pests. Other than that, kids can basically join up as a team. I would say probably four to five kids per team is the maximum number. There are certain constraints as far as the size goes. The structure cannot be more than 24 inches tall, and then the base cannot be larger than 18 by 18 [inches].”

Ms. Prescott, new to Westwood, approached her role with an overarching goal: diversify the library’s audience. While some students enter the library for books, others have different needs, from studying and socializing to finding a place where they belong. During the planning process, Ms. Prescott and Ms. Kluck tapped into the interests of student engineers and artists, sizable portions of the student body, in an effort to engage a wider variety of students in the library’s events.

“We have lots of kids who are super engineers here at Westwood, and that’s where we were thinking the gingerbread house would attract those kids,” Ms. Prescott said. “We did share [the contest] with the engineering teachers and the art teachers, so we’re hoping that kids are hearing about it through those teachers as well.”

Ms. Prescott and Ms. Kluck drew inspiration from Stony Point High School Librarian Christine Carter, who hosted a similar contest. Their connections range far and wide, giving rise to this contest in a show of cross-collaboration. Upon hearing about their fellow librarians’ contest, both librarians jumped at the chance to plan and execute a unique contest on their own campus.

“Ms. Carter had shared this [idea] with us, and we were like, ‘this would be a great idea,’” Ms. Prescott said. “What we hope is that kids will take some of this cardboard that we have here in the library that we’re providing, and they’ll use that to construct their gingerbread house. We have an example here from our library aides. They’re not quite finished yet — this is still a work in progress — but you can see they have put some thought into it. We’re hoping that we can deploy the different houses throughout the territory, and then hopefully we’ll get some teachers to come in and judge.”

The librarians took care to advertise the novel event to the Westwood community by sending out weekly promotional materials and encouraging Warriors to submit to the competition via word-of-mouth. Both librarians plan to place contest submissions on bookcases as they roll in during the submission window of Monday, Dec. 1, to Friday, Dec. 5. After the final day of submission, faculty members will judge the submissions placed on top of bookshelves, and librarians will announce the winners by Friday, Dec. 12.

“I checked my email and I saw the librarians had put [the contest] up,” Matzdorf said. “I think it will be really fun to do, so [I’m telling] my friends I want to do it and asking them if they want to do it.”

Ultimately, the planning process of the gingerbread house contest is geared toward students who don’t typically interact with the library, tying into the library’s renewed goal of diversifying their audience.

“In regards to the library, we know not everybody is coming in here for the books,” Ms. Prescott said. “We understand we’ve got lots of kids that come in and they love to read, and we love those kids, but we also love the kids that come in here to study or to find a place where they belong. It may not have anything to do with the books that we have on the shelves. I think trying to find different ideas helps bring in different types of kids rather than what you would traditionally see kids coming into the library just looking for something to read.”