CHRISTMAS COLLECTIONS

stories by KRISTINA DOMITROVICH photos by LINDSAY PACE

Whether it’s nutcrackers, themed ornaments, Christmas mice or a corner full of snowmen, we all have our favorite holiday decorations. These are the items that are mourned when lost in a dark corner of the attic and celebrated when found, are most preciously packed away for the next year’s festivities and are as familiar as a favorite Christmas song.

The following three stories hightlight people who have curated Christmas collections over their lifetimes. Some of these collections include antique items, some can fit in the palm of your hand, but all are sentimental and embody the spirit of Christmas in the eyes of the beholder.

Miracle for Church Street

Close to the midnight hour on Nov. 5, 2018, a tornado touched down in Tupelo. One of the homes damaged belonged to Spencer and Jess Gray; included in the damage, the storage Miracle for Church Street shed in their backyard was overturned and in a creek. In it were their Christmas decorations. What would be a heartbreaking reality to any family was intensified, because their Christmas decorations include a collection of Department 56 Snow Village pieces. This is a collection Spencer helped to curate throughout his life, dating back to the -80s, when his father started a tradition of gifting a piece to Spencer’s mother for anniversaries, birthdays and Christmases.

Previous page: Trucks lined up outside of the Village’s Court House. This page clockwise: Jess and Spencer find it best to work on one collection at a time, hunting down the pieces to complete that set. Currently, they’re working on the Griswolds from the 1989 holiday classic movie, “National Lampoon’s Family Vacation;” The Corner Café; Jess and Spencer Gray; The Village children playing in the snow; The Village children getting presents from Santa.

Each year growing up, being the 11th out of 13 children, Spencer would assemble the Snow Village with his father.

“It was kind of our thing,” he said. “It’d be like, ‘You want to help me put up the Snow Village?’ and I was like, ‘Sure.’ So it just kind of became this tradition for me and him, and so it was fun. I love doing it every year.”

Each year, they would assemble the Village, and each year it would grow. His dad usually went to Village Green in Tupelo to find the new pieces. Spencer remembers the Village stretching throughout his parents’ home growing up, usually with certain things grouped together: the farm scene would go in one place, they would have to tables set up in the dining room and, eventually, his father installed shelves around the whole room to holdd the village.

“We would set it up the same way every year,” he said.

No matter what, one scene was never going to change: Church Street.

Spencer’s parents’ home was and still is on Church Street in downtown Tupelo. One of the Village homes his father bought was, in Spencer’s words, “Identical to my mom’s house where I grew up.” There was another Village house that looked “identical to the house across the street.” There’s a school building called Jefferson School, and Jefferson Street and Church Street run perpendicular to each other in downtown Tupelo; Spencer attended Church Street Elementary, adding to the sentimentality of it all. Then his father bought a church piece, which Spencer said closely resembled the Calvary Baptist Church in Tupelo, before it burned down Dec. 22, 1992. He and his family attended the church, and he said he remembers standing outside of his childhood home, watching the church burn down the street.

This little scene of Village pieces reminiscent of downtown Tupelo does not change from year to year, and it is always displayed in the same order on the mantel. That’s how it was each year in his parents’ home when he and his father would assemble the Village; and that’s how it is in he and Jess’ home, now that his father has passed away.

The first Christmas after his father’s passing, Spencer set up the village in his mother’s home on Church Street. After that, it would be about another five years before he put the Village up again, between starting college and the amount of work it takes each year to put up and take down, and it being hard on his mom, as they were married for 48 years.

The year Spencer and Jess started dating, he assembled the Village once again in his childhood home that Christmas.

“So I got to watch the whole process,” she said, joking that she knew what she was getting into.

When the two married in 2012, his mother said they could have the collection. Since then, Spencer devotes the Saturday after Thanksgiving to assembling the Village.

“My dad, he would videotape the Snow Village, and then I would stand there and go, ‘This is my Mom’s Snow Village,’” Spencer said, laughing.

Aside from the video, Spencer mostly goes off of his own memory to figure out where the different pieces go when he’s assembling the Village each year. But now, he does “cheat a little bit” and takes pictures of the Village each year.

The couple has it down to a routine now, and Jess has basically learned to wait until the end before getting involved.

“Our first year we were married, I was like, ‘Oh, let’s put this here!’ And he was like, ‘That doesn’t go there,’” Jess said, laughing.

Now, she sprinkles the snow around the Village at the end. That’s one trick Spencer has learned over the years: He gets the thin blanket of snow for the base, so the pieces won’t topple over like they do when they’re standing in the fluffy snow; then, they said they sprinkle on the fluffy, “glittery snow (as) the last layer.”

Another trick, or rather a challenge for Spencer, is trying to hide all the cords, and rig it to flip as few switches as possible. He joked that it adds to the wow factor.

“I always like to see if I can hook it all together,” he said. “Because the less buttons you have to do, and less stuff you have to plug in, it’s just that much cooler when somebody walks into a dark room and you go push a button and all these lights come on.”

Each year, they’ll have people come visit the Village, usually their friends who have children.

“It’s part of some of our friends’ notecards for special things they do,” Jess said. “Come to our house and see the Snow Village. So that, for us, is special (seeing it) through a child’s eyes.”

Left: The Village offers familiar scenes, like the 1983 classic holiday movie, “A Christmas Story;” Right: A Coca-Cola delivery man works through the cold to load a delivery truck leaving the Coca-Cola factory. Next page, left: Spencer keeps all the notes his father attached to each village piece before giving it to his mom; Right: The church on Church Street, which is assembled on top of the mantel each year.

Each year, Spencer said his mother will come by their house to take it in.

“That’s always sweet, like she kind of sits and looks at them,” he said, smiling.

Over the years, the collection has expanded. Jess now buys new pieces for Spencer, at least one a year. Finding the pieces is no longer as easy as going to a local store, though the couple did buy two pieces from Relics Antique Marketplace downtown, they usually have to hunt pieces down on eBay or Amazon. Jess said whenever she happens upon a piece, she buys it then and doesn’t wait to “snag it.” With the original pieces from his father, which include the original packaging and some hand-written notes like, “From the old rooster and all your little chicks,” Spencer guesses the collection includes about 50 pieces.

For Jess and Spencer, their favorite part of the

holidays is when they turn off all the lights, except for the Snow Village and Christmas tree, and turn on a Christmas movie, with Church Street sitting below the TV on the mantel.

For Jess, each year she’s excited to share the magic of the Village with Spencer, but in a way, with his dad, too.

“I’m very sentimental, too. There are so many things I call my treasures that were my grandmother’s or my mom’s or things like that. We both very much echo, any kind of sentimental — we both love it. My sister’s like, ‘Oh, you picked someone perfect for his outlook on Christmas.’ I know how special it is to him, and I never knew his dad. And so it’s just a part that I get as a piece of this guy that I get to know,” she said tearing up. “His dad was such an influence on the man that he is.”

So when the tornado hit their home in 2018, and it threw their storage shed with all the Christmas décor into the creek bed, a special pang of worry struck them both. When friends came over to help clear the rubble, they got into the shed and began pulling out the Snow Village, one storage box at a time.

Nearly the whole collection was unscathed. Some suffered water damage and had to be dried out, but only a single piece was cracked, and it was a newer addition, not an original piece from his father.

Dreaming of A Silver Christmas

In 1974, Joan Ball moved to Starkville and started own ornaments, saw the gesture as incredibly meaningful. working at Montgomery Jewelers. In her time “She said, ‘I know you would just really love it, so I want there, something caught her eye: a sterling silver ornament. you to have it,’” Ball said. “And I just squalled and squalled.” She decided to buy it. One of her favorite ornaments came from her friend and

“I really never thought I would really get into it that big, next-door neighbor, Patty, who gave her a sphere made of two and that’s just how I got started,” she said. intricately detailed flat pieces that are connected together in

Since then, Ball’s accrued just a few more, and now has a the center, forming quadrants in the sphere. Ball has learned total of 83. over the years that people who used to design jewelry usually

“Through the years,” she said, “people have given them to design some of the “more ornate” pieces. me (and) I bought them on trips.” At one point, she was “obsessed” with getting the same

Last year, on a trip with friends through France, she stayed number of ornaments as her age; she was hoping to get 65 on the hunt for a new piece to add to her collection, until she ornaments by the time she turned 65. She said she turned 69 finally picked up a sterling silver French Santa. She gets excited last month, and laughed that so far she’s still ahead. When she about the new pieces, and likes to show them to visitors. surpassed that goal, she set a new one reaching for 100. She

“The little French Santa, he’s so cute. Isn’t he darling?” she joked that her friends are hoping to see her add the remaining said. “He’s just absolutely the cutest little thing.” 17 to her collection soon.

But friends have gifted her a few over the years, like this “It’s almost like they’re going, ‘Please get to a hundred and past year, when a friend gave her a duplicate snowflake she had shut up!’” she laughed. in her own collection. Ball, who has duplicates of some of her While they are ornaments, Ball doesn’t hang them on her tree, at least not anymore. Each year, she finds new ways to display them near a window. One year, she hung them from decorative birch branches, another year it was detached Christmas tree limbs, this year it will be copper pipes. She hangs them from the rods, and attaches them with hooks, “so I can take them off and polish them, because I usually put them up (around) Thanksgiving or before,” and leaves them up until the middle of January.

Previous spread, Left: Joan Ball sometimes displays her ornaments by category, like grouping all the snowflakes together; Right: Some ornaments are detailed scenes, while others have sayings, like the ornament that features festive reds and greens; This spread clockwise, starting top left: Ball used ribbons to string her ornaments; Some ornaments are 3D, like Christmas balls or the lamp shaped ornament; Some of her ornaments are pieces of a designer’s 12 Days of Christmas set, like these two turtled doves; Ball holds some of her favorite pieces from the years, including this detailed horse-drawn cbuggy scene on a ball, or the 3D divided sphere gifted to her by her neighbor and friend.

While the ornaments are usually on display for about two months, Ball said she polishes each piece of the collection before she puts them up and after she takes them down for the year, but it’s a shot in the dark on which pieces will need to be polished, and how many times, while they’re on display. She “loves to polish” though, so she doesn’t mind.

“It’s very satisfying, but you see, I’m a Virgo, a true Virgo,” she said. “I think it’s seeing it all dull and tarnished, and then seeing it nice and shiny.”

The designs of the ornaments vary, as new options are realeased each year. Because sterling silver ornaments are no longer necessarily a staple, they’re getting kind of hard for Ball to find. Outside of the annual releases from the staple companies, she said she usually has luck at estate sales or pawn shops selling them for their metallic value. A lot of times, there might be a running series over the years, a series like the 12 Days of Christmas. Other times, it might revolve around an item.

“I kind of went through a snowflake stage, and then a cross stage and then the it-didn’t-matter-what stage,” she said giggling.

Some years, she’ll group the ornaments by category for their display — all the crosses together, “all stars, all snowflakes” — but some years, she’ll “hang them up every which way.” Since 2020 has been so crazy, she’s leaning toward that option this year. Some ornaments are engraved with the year on the back, but some aren’t; for those, she goes to a local jeweler in Tupelo, where she was born and raised and returned to in 1987 — and buys a little sterling silver tag or coin engraved with the year to attach.

Ball, a retired teacher, spends her days with her Cocker Spaniel, Elvis, gardening, sometimes cross stitching little ornaments — another collection and tradition she keeps with her sister — and reminding her friends tokeep their eyes peeled for sterling silver ornaments for her.

Christmas in Tupelo

In the timespan of just a few weeks, Don and Susan McGukin eloped in Hot Springs, Christmas in Tupelo Arkansas, moved to Tupelo and started a business, Don’s family medicine practice. That was about 23 years ago. The couple met in their college town in Georgia, where they’re both from — Don’s house in college was next to Susan’s apartment, and one day they stumbled into one another.

In 2019, the two celebrated 22 years in Tupelo and spent their first Christmas in their own home. “It’s so ironic,” Susan said, because the two have always made the holiday voyage back to their families in Georgia, usually alternating which days to spend with their different families. But last year was different, after having lost their parents.

“We were like, ‘We’re going to start a new tradition, and we’re going to be at home,” she said.

Far left: Bubble lights are some of the couple’s favorite traditional Christmas decorations, which they have had success finding in a store in Verona; Left: The “Vintage Tree” sits in a nook at the bottom of their home’s staircase, filled with bubble lights, a few ornaments and old Christmas cards dating back to the early 1900s. These cards were exchanges between Don’s grandmother, her friends and cousins. Above: Some of the cards displayed on the tree. Don said the greeting card with the dog on it is maybe one of his favorites, which he believes is an image of one of the president’s dogs, like one of President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s two Scottish terriers.

They decided to make the most of their first Christmas together in Tupelo, going all out with the decorations; which, as it turns out, was pretty easy to pull together. While they usually decorate each Christmas with their main tree no matter what, they wait to put it up until two to three weeks before Christmas because it’s a real tree.

“If you put them up too early,” Don chuckled, “they just become fire hazards!”

Between their individual collections, like Susan’s collection of Santa Clauses, the house was decked out for Christmas.

“I had no idea 25 years ago I would collect Santas that long,” Susan said. “It’s just kind of fun.”

One year, a friend suggested Susan group them all together, so now she puts them up in the same room. Her favorite is an Irish Santa, dressed in green, holding shamrocks and rocking a leprechaun hat.

“Don and I are both into genealogy,” she said. “We both have Irish ancestors, so that one’s just different and special.”

In true genealogy-loving fashion, a part of the decorations include a collection of letters from Don’s grandmother. When his family was going through her things after she passed, he came across all of her letters, which his family was just going to throw away.

“The stamps and the dates and just the history of them,” he said. “That was much more important in that era than it ever has been in my lifetime.”

The letters date back to the early 1900s, and Don usually displays the

This spread clockwise, starting at the top left: One of Susan’s Santa ornaments of him taking a bath – she actually has two comical ornaments of Santas in bath tubs; A framed photo of Santa fixing a red truck hangs in the couple’s bedroom during the holidays; The Santa figurine collection was largely contained in the couple’s bedroom, where a festive collage is centered over their bed, adorned with Christmas pillows; A table’s centerpiece in the couple’s library, where most of the birds are kept, as they both enjoy bird watching and collecting bird décor.