NORWALK — A Newtown woman and her delicious holiday lighthouse are vying for the $1,500 grand prize in The Maritime Aquarium at Norwalk’s 13th annual Festival of Lighthouses Contest.

Donna Kern Ball’s “Gingerbread Man Kind” is among the 24 creative handmade entries in the holiday display, which will be open daily through January 19 in the popular Connecticut family attraction.

The lighthouse contest works like a juried art show except that the thousands of visitors who visit the Maritime Aquarium are the jury. Guests can follow the homemade beacons through the galleries and cast a vote for their favorite. The creator(s) of the lighthouse that gets the most votes wins $1,500. There are also cash awards for five runners-up.

The 24 lighthouses were built by local artists looking for a challenge, by families who wanted to work together on a fun project, and by students fulfilling a school assignment.

Seeing the lighthouses — and casting a vote — is free with Aquarium admission.

Ms Ball has entered the contest four straight years. She won in 2011 with “Sugar Cookie Sheffield Island,” a lighthouse made from sugar cookies; came in sixth in 2012 with “Wooly West Quoddy,”  a crocheted beacon she co-created with her mother, Marie Kern; and took home the second-place prize last year with “Twinkie, Twinkie, Little Lighthouse,” a design made from Twinkies

^®

, Ho Hos

^®

and other Hostess snack cakes.

“I have won, placed and showed,” she wrote on her blog (donnakernball.com/blog) last month. “The creative pressure was on to make something that was purely delightful. I chose gingerbread and peppermint for my vocabulary. I pictured brickwork out of gingerbread, with ornamentation of peppermint.”

Ms Ball’s entry this year is a large round beacon of white frosting, festooned on multiple levels with gingerbread figures, gingerbread hearts, candy canes, ribbon candy and peppermints. Painstaking pipings of frosting on the gingerbread figures cast them in all sorts of professions – sailor, musician, athlete, firefighter and more.

Going through her cookie cutter collection and discovering “quite a few different [gingerbread] man-cutters,” she wrote, “gave me the idea to do ‘mankind,’ with an emphasis on ‘kind’ by using hearts.”

Judith Bacal, the aquarium’s exhibits director, says she and the staff at the aquarium are “amazed by the time and effort that our contestants put into their lighthouses.

“The bar gets raised every year on design and craftsmanship,” she continued. “In turn, having all these smart and creative pieces of art on display only makes the experience of visiting The Maritime Aquarium during the holiday season even more engaging, enjoyable and memorable.”

Rules of the Festival of Lighthouses Contest are kept to a minimum to allow for maximum creativity. Lighthouses must be 3 to 6 feet tall and have a working light, and may not include animal remains, including shells. Beyond that, it’s up to the creators’ imaginations. Some lighthouses are modeled after actual lighthouses; others are wildly whimsical.

The Newtown resident who has now entered the competition four times is still enjoying herself.

“The competition at the Festival of Lighthouses is fierce, worthy, inspiring, and always fun,” Ms Ball wrote last month. This is after, at her estimation, she spent $200 on peppermint and $80 on cookie dough ingredients. She had the foamcore she used as the lighthouse base already available at home.

There was another 42 hours “on everything else,” she wrote in her blog, “for a total of 60 hours, over a period of about 3 weeks.”

She also estimates there was 18 hours spent on making dough, baking and decorating the gingerbread people (Ms Ball had some help with that).

Lighthouses in the 2014 contest are made out of everything from wood, paper and stone to frosting, gingerbread, crocheted yarn, gumballs and homemade candies. Some are modeled after real lighthouses, such as the Penfield Reef Lighthouse in Fairfield. Others are wildly imaginative, with dragons, zombies and the cast of Disney’s Frozen all represented.

Chris Loynd said that with each Aquarium visitor receiving a Festival of Lighthouses Contest ballot, members of the same family often vote for different creations.

“Because each visitor gets a lighthouse ballot, the contest adds another element of family fun to an Aquarium visit, as kids and parents debate and compare their votes,” he said. “Their opinions usually are quite different.”

Besides the contest’s $1,500 top award, other prizes are $750 for second place, $375 for third, 300 for fourth, 225 for fifth, $150 for sixth. Winners will be announced at an evening reception on January

Mrs Ball and her son have done the math to figure out how their time would be paid for should “Gingerbread Man Kind” win, place or show this year. They also know that if the lighthouse places fourth or below, they will have lost money on the project.

“But,” she wrote, “we all know that the reason one participates in a competition of this sort is not for the money, but the share others’ creative efforts and challenge one’s own.”

The 2014 Festival of Lighthouses Contest is free with Maritime Aquarium general admission, which is $19.95 for adults, $17.95 for ages 13-17 and seniors, and $12.95 for ages 3-12.

For more details about Maritime Aquarium exhibits, IMAXmaritimeaquarium.org.

^®

movies and programs, call 203-852-0700 or visit