There won’t be visitors coming through the door of Elaine Hautanen’s Jaffrey home this year, but she still decided to keep with a holiday tradition that spans more than three decades.
Every year, friends and family enjoy the miniature Christmas village that encompasses two long tables in her living room. They search for that year’s addition, as well as one piece that she puts in a different spot each holiday season. But with the coronavirus keeping people away from one another, Hautanen knew that setting up the village, which entails about 70 miniature buildings, people and animals, would only be enjoyed by her and her husband Walt.
She toyed with the idea of taking a year off, keeping it all boxed up until 2021, but then thought better of it. After all, putting the village together dates back to when her children were young.
“I cannot not do it because it’s a tradition,” she said.
Hautanen still remembers the first set she got from BJ’s Wholesale Club, including a church, town hall and a town clock. The next year she bought another group of buildings – a barn, silo and farm house.
“It progressed from there,” she said. “Each year I’d buy a piece, from different stores, different types.”
Back then, the village sets and individual pieces were in all the stores, but now they’re a little harder to find. As she started getting more and more buildings, Hautanen sought to find people to match. She had a doctor’s office for years and then found a doctor and patient. There’s a town crier for the town hall and a child eating a lollipop in front of the candy store. At the church, you can find a baby being baptized and a newly married couple. With the farm setup, chickens, pigs and sheep roam the pastures, and in the great outdoors, deer, bears, eagles and beavers can be found near the cabin.
Walt built her a replica of Mount Monadnock with a moon. There are carolers, Santa visiting with a young child and a family taking a horse drawn wagon ride. And of course the scene is a snowy wonderland complete with light up Christmas trees.
“It becomes magical,” Hautanen said, adding that a lot of the buildings light up. “If you like Christmas, you’ll like it.”
Over the years, Hautanen has personalized some of the buildings to be more representative of Jaffrey, the place she has called home her entire life.
She turned an old bakery into Walt’s Signs, her husband’s business on the same property, complete with a man (meant to be Walt) on a ladder painting signs. Walt painted the lettering for the mini Jaffrey Police Station and St. Patrick’s Church, and Hautanen has many other building she envisions as stores, businesses and landmarks from town.
“I’m trying to make a little Jaffrey village here,” she said. “And that includes some older buildings that used to be here years ago.”
She has replaced a few of the scenic buildings because “they are coming out with new ones that are much nicer.”
As the scene grew over the years, Hautanen said she was fortunate to have a large living room – 16 by 24 – that could accommodate the large tables and extensions set up in an L formation.
It’s setup in such a way that there are tiers, so not everything is on one level.
“You don’t want it to all just be flat,” Hautanen said. “Everything has its place.”
She typically starts the day after Thanksgiving and works on it for a few days, this year finishing the last day of November.
“It takes longer than it used to,” Hautanen said. “It’s a labor of love.”
During those days of when her children were young, Hautanen remembers they’d make snowmen out of cotton balls
She’ll miss having loved ones at the house this year, friends she’s known for years. It’s a long-standing tradition for others to see how she set it up and what’s new, and maybe, she said, she’ll rebuild it when it’s safer to have visitors.
“I think I’m having a Christmas in July party this year,” she said.