As you drive through streets ablaze with Christmas lights and glowing blow-ups, pause to reflect on the holiday treasures that may adorn homes on the inside.
These more closely held decorations hold the accumulation of years and precious memories.
Joanna Hamnes, 79, lines nearly every surface in her Minnehaha home just outside Vancouver city limits with some 100 Santa Claus figurines. The collection began with a Santa made of tin, passed down from her mother.
“It’s something people knew I liked, so they started giving them to me as gifts,” Hamnes said. “I have tubs and tubs and tubs of them every year to get out.”
She broke her hip a couple of years ago, which makes it hard for her to get around, so she no longer hangs lights or decorates outside. After years caring for children after school, she has become pretty familiar with her neighbors. Twelve-year-old twins who live down the street help her unpack her Santas to decorate her home.
Her collection includes Santas dressed in costumes from around the world. She has one that’s 4 feet tall. Another she calls her cowboy Santa Claus, because he has a rocking horse attached to his belt.
“It’s kind of fun if nothing else,” she said.
For Joanne Pearson, who lives in the Garrison Heights neighborhood of Vancouver, Christmas is all about nutcrackers.
“I lose count. There’s a lot,” Pearson said. “I walked around the house, and I think I hit about 174 nutcrackers, and that doesn’t count the tree.”
She estimates another 150 or so nutcracker ornaments hang there.
Pearson said she has always liked nutcrackers, but only began amassing them in adulthood. Now 75 and retired, she was CEO of Northwest Navigation Federal Credit Union when she heard a friend and client was headed to Germany, famous for it nutcrackers.
“I asked her to get me one. She gave me three,” Pearson said.
And so it began.
“A lot of them have been gifts. Some I see and have to have,” she said. “I have everything from relatively cheap ones on up.”
She loves her Ulbricht and Steinbach nutcrackers, but also one she picked up at Kmart.
“I haven’t stuck with just nutcracker figures. I have quite a few other things and it ties it all together,” Pearson said. For example, she embroidered a nutcracker bedspread about 10 years ago to add to her assortment.
“It started small and it got totally out of control,” she said. “You go from a collection to obsession.”
