It seems like the Holiday season starts earlier every year, with Christmas lights on store shelves in October, and carols on the radio before Thanksgiving. But for Bronx chef Jon Lovtich, the season started even earlier than most, last February. That's when he started constructing Gingerbread Lane, the entirely edible gingerbread village recently deemed the world's largest by Guinness World Records. (The world's largest gingerbread house went to a construction in Texas that didn't qualify for the edible prize since the frame was made of wood.)The 1.5 ton cookie construction currently spans 300-square-feet at the New York Hall of Science in Queens. For perspective, that's as heavy as a large hippopotamus and the size as a two-car garage.For the past year, 37-year-old Lovitch has been baking and building the village's houses, ice rink, firehouse, and railroad stations at his apartment in the Bronx near Yankee Stadium.He says he's spent a 'few grand' on the project, buying 400 pounds of candy, ingredients for 500 pounds of gingerbread dough and 2,240 pounds of icing. Unsurprisingly the cookie construction packs quite the calorie count. The dough is the the most dangerous with over 958,000 calories, the decorators icing amounts to around 423,000 and if all 400 pounds of candy were from candy canes, that would mean nearly 699,000 calories.  Mr Lovtich says he saves money by buying ingredients anytime he's out of the city, cleaning out rural supermarkets of flour, candy and sugar.Making the gingerbread village came second to his job as the executive chef at the New York Marriott at the Brooklyn Bridge, and most of the baking and construction took place after midnight while his wife was asleep.'My wife likes the fact that I work on it at home and I'm not out gambling or drinking,' he told the New York Times.It wasn't until this fall that Mr Lovitch started driving the 164 structures stored in his apartment's empty bedroom to the Hall of Science for assembly in the days leading up to the November 17 opening. And he continues to add to the structure even midway into December.The artist's mother, Vickie Lovitch, calls her son a 'gingerbread Santa Claus' and told the Times that his obsession with Christmas started at a young age when he would string 10,000 Christmas lights outside their house.His focus on gingerbread as a medium came when he was a teenager, and he lost a competition in his hometown of Kansas City, Missouri.Since then, he's been trying to make up for that initial loss, making bigger and better constructions each year as he moved around the country, from Washington, DC to Pittsburgh.Last January he moved to New York City with the express purpose of getting more attention for his gingerbread making, and hopefully turning the hobby into a full-time career making and teaching gingerbread architecture.'Being a chef, people may remember my meals for a day or two, but with the gingerbread, I can get thousands of people at a time to checkout out my work,' he said. 'I've gotten emails a year later, thanking me for it.'Gingerbread Lane can be viewed at the Hall of Sciences in Queens until January 12 - the day it will be disassembled and visitors can take pieces of the village home with them to eat. Those pieces baked in early February might be a little stale though.Mr Lovtich also has another gingerbread village in the city this winter, at the Marriott. It's three stories high with 75 structures and he's been baking it out of the hotel's kitchen.(dailymail.co.uk)ANN.Az