Decking the halls is a whole lot harder when you’re decorating something 10 times smaller than a human hair.

But that didn’t stop Travis Casagrande from going big this holiday season by constructing something super tiny.

The research associate at the Canadian Centre for Electron Microscopy at Hamilton’s McMaster University is the man behind what may be the smallest house ever built — about half the size of one made in France last year.

Casagrande’s creation is a home for the holidays — a gingerbread house complete with a wreath over the door, a cheery brick chimney, Christmas tree details carved into the walls and a patriotic Canadian flag doormat.

“Compared to the size of a typical gingerbread house that you might buy in a grocery store kit, mine is 20,000 times smaller,” he explained.

But the festive surprises don’t stop there.

Zoom out slightly from the silicon structure and you’ll see it’s actually perched atop a smiling snowman that’s giving a mischievous wink. Pull back even farther and a seemingly massive cylinder appears — believe it or not, that’s a human hair.

Each of those steps was intentional, explained their creator.

“The point of that was sort of to make some jaws drop when you realize even the snowman, which is much bigger than the house, is extremely tiny compared to the hair you see next.”

Casagrande used a focused ion beam microscope to etch out the microscopic details with a beam of charged gallium ions, which he compared to a sandblaster.

It’s the same tool he and other staff members at the centre rely on daily to prepare even smaller samples for research they conduct for a wide range of sectors, including the automotive industry, electronics and nuclear material.

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