Let's start from afar, with the story of the gingerbread man
The gingerbread man originates from cookies that were baked for various religious ceremonies back in pagan times. Then the cookies looked like people, because the treats were an offering to appease this or that god. Then, cookies began to bake in the form of birds and animals, and they also began to be used as a dessert and, in rare cases, as toys for children.
Yes, imagine, jokes about gingerbread nailed to the ceiling and a difficult childhood had a historical basis. Spoiler alert: Don't try to play with them - that's a bad idea for you and for the carrot. Later, gingerbread cookies ceased to be toys, and are used today only as a dessert.
But don't you think the transition of the carrot from a sacred thing, even something close to God, to a banal children's toy is too abrupt? What had to happen for everyone to forget about their original idea? Mass agitation against gingerbread, but by whom? A grain bread campaign to discredit the image of the sacrificial carrot? Crops conspiracy? The above sounds, of course, like nonsense, but maybe not, but the fact remains: the roles have changed too abruptly for no reason.
And what does Tula have to do with it?
And Tula is here despite the fact that paganism was also widespread in those parts, but the gingerbread figures there were very different from the figures of those times.
Promotional video:
They were, of course, not like that, but these are just cool.
On Tula gingerbread, objects strange for that time were often depicted: rockets, airplanes, spacesuits, and so on. People, in turn, were depicted with objects strangely similar to telephones, with a crosshair on the chest and in other rather interesting images. You never know if gingerbread animals were common. True, they weren't. Doesn't it remind you of the modern tradition of making dishes in the shape of the coming year? I am sure that piglets and tails flaunted on your New Year's tables on salads or other dishes.
Also, the manuscripts and legends of the peoples who lived in those regions claim that some locals were afraid and revered these figures. Some kept them at home as charms, while others, on the contrary, baked them for the dead to appease. Folklore claims that through these figures the spirits of the ancestors could speak with the descendants, and if they were honest people, then instruct and help them, and if on the contrary, then torment them with nightmares and frighten the guilty poor fellows.
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Tula is a good and beautiful city, which is famous not only for delicious gingerbread, but also for its numerous, but no less unique, temples, its own Kremlin and a museum of samovars. After all, everyone has probably heard stories about how Tula broke her own record in "gingerbread craft". And in our time, the time of space flights, the introduction of robots, artificial intelligence, not all of them are told to the end.