Holiday Heirlooms Bring Comfort and Joy
One of Frank W. Waikart’s fondest childhood memories is of waking on Christmas morning to miniature scenes his father had set out beneath the tree: villages, parks and barnyards peopled by tiny lead figures perched on benches, walking dogs or tending to even tinier chickens and pigs. He remembers a pair of penguins skating each year on a little round mirror masquerading as a frozen pond.
Some 40 years later, in a cream-colored cottage in a Maryland suburb, Waikart, an FBI career man like his father, is still building on the tradition begun by his dad. “My father put these figures out each Christmas for his three sons,” says Waikart. “Now I do it for my son.”
Bringing out treasures collected over the years is a ritual repeated in many homes during the holidays. Sometimes a collection starts with one object--a black angel for the mantel or an ornament shaped like an antique car--and just keeps growing. Sometimes it’s a tradition begun long ago by someone else and carried on--like hand-whittled nutcrackers dating back to a great-grandmother from Austria. But any objects that evoke memories of Christmas Past and are likely to be added to the Christmas Future count as a collection. All you have to do is find a place to show them off.
Most of Frank Waikart’s little lead figures, including patriotic sailors marching in formation, sledding Santas and the penguins, were handed down. Some, like a butcher shop and a stylish Victorian woman in hat and muff, are recent acquisitions. A few are gifts from his wife, Mary Anne. Altogether there are more than 100, with about half set up on the hearth in the family room. “It’s not an obsession, but I do add to the collection occasionally,” says Waikart, who also collects toy soldiers.
For Jane Lukes, Christmas begins when she unpacks more than 40 ornaments she has needlepointed over the last 25 years. Most were designed to hang on the tree: sprigs of holly, reindeer and sleds; otters to remind her of her native California; frogs, a favorite collectible; and a Martha’s Vineyard lighthouse that conjures past vacations.
Parading across the living room mantel in her Alexandria, Va., rambler are meticulously detailed needlepoint figures large and small: Santas embroidered with fuzzy beards; snowmen, including one with a flag and another in a party hat marking Y2K; gingerbread houses with crisscrossed candy canes for windows and little pearls for doorknobs.
“I’ve been doing it forever,” says Lukes, who just put the finishing touches on a needlepoint Nativity scene: Mary, Joseph, Wise Men, angels and baby Jesus, with pinpoint stitches for halos, crowns and a starry sky, longer stitches for the hay in the manger.
“My mother taught me how to needlepoint when I was a young mother, but I extended it to Christmas,” Lukes says.
Now she likes to personalize her store-bought canvases: a Santa with a rod and reel for her fisherman husband George, a scientist by day; a Sugarplum Fairy for daughter Alison, 24, who works in the New York fashion scene with Michael Kors; a San Francisco Santa with a sea lion in a collar of holly for son Jamie, 28, who will soon enter law school. A Santa in lederhosen commemorates the year the family lived in Austria.
Energy lawyer Jim Beh’s cache of old-style mechanical toys began with an annual Christmas visit to a next-door neighbor when he was a boy back in Des Moines. “Mrs. Lynn would have us come over for milk and cookies, and there were always train tracks and little metal wind-up toys under the tree that we would play with.”
His parents thought it such a neat idea, he says, that they started their own collection. “At first there were just a few, but it expanded. Soon, says Beh, “they were to the point that every horizontal surface in their living room had a toy on it at Christmas.”
His parents, now in their 70s, are still collecting. And Beh, who lives in Washington with his wife, Laura, and sons Henry, 4, and Jimmy, 8, is adding to his playful objects. Two tables in their living room overflow with toys brought down from the attic when the tree went up. “Everybody gives us toys as gifts,” he says.
A few date from the 1950s and ‘60s, but most are either new or reproductions of classics. Favorites include a drum-beating panda, a ball-spinning seal and a bike-riding duck whose propeller hat spins as he pedals along. Henry loves the pocket-ride carousel. Just push the lever and rockets are launched.
When all the toys are switched on, the twirling mice, dancing monkeys and prancing elephants make a cheerful racket. But that’s the point. Quiet, slicker high-tech toys are not allowed.
“The simple stuff,” Beh says, “is a lot more fun.”