Today in History—December 20: “Hansel and Gretel” and the Gingerbread Boom

On this day in 1812 brothers Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm published the first volume of stories that would make them famous: Kinder- und Hausmärchen (“Children’s and Household Tales”).

Among the 156 fables in the first collection was “Hansel and Gretel,” which introduced the world to one unforgettable bit of landscaping: a witch’s cottage “built of bread and covered with cakes.”

Just 13 months apart in age, the Brothers Grimm had studied law in Germany, but linguistics and folklore were their real passions. Beginning about 1806, they collected folk songs and poetry from across Europe, blending these oral traditions into a single strange and sometimes gruesome anthology.

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This was the OG Brothers Grimm: before Disney, before bedtime stories, before seven reprintings spanning five decades. Later editions sanitized many of the tales, tempering the darker elements of “Cinderella” and “Snow White,” for example, and dropping the more horrifying entries entirely, including “How the Children Played at Slaughtering” (you can imagine why this one was cut).

The tale of “Hansel and Gretel”—two starving children outsmarting a witch with a tasty home—remained mostly intact from the 1812 publication to later editions. Revisions hedged on whether it was the children’s mother or stepmother who twice abandons them in the woods, and the brothers added a fuzzy duckling who kindly ferries the children across the water to their father’s cabin. No edition ever tells us what happens to the cookie cottage, though.

Gingerbread houses were being made in Germany as early as the 1600s, but it wasn’t until the Grimms’ publication that they really took off and more people started making them. The brothers had tapped into an old superstition linking witches and gingerbread: It was once believed that witches could enchant gingerbread figures to harm their enemies. Yet somehow the witch’s cottage in the story shifted the spotlight to something far more cozy—and delicious. Today gingerbread houses are a mainstay of holiday celebrations across the U.S. and Europe.

And we have two scholarly brothers—and one hungry witch in the woods—to thank for it.

Famous Birthdays

1805: Thomas Graham—Scottish chemist

1867: Pudge Heffelfinger—American athlete and coach

1868: Harvey Firestone—American businessman

1954: Sandra Cisneros—American author