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Deck the Walls

Sandy Davis’ home is rich with nostalgic holiday decorations

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FINLEY POINT — Although her children now have their own offspring, Sandy Davis still gets as excited about Christmas as youngsters anticipating Santa’s arrival.

Not a space in her home goes undecorated, including bedrooms and bathrooms — mostly with items she’s found through the years at second-hand stores.

End tables support families of carolers with lit streetlamps. Her bath towels are stacked red, white and green. Every picture hanging throughout her home is wrapped in bright Christmas paper. Even her four-poster bed is lit with garland, which she leaves up all year. At last count, she displays seven Christmas trees and 156 Santas. And there are still two more plastic tubs of decorations to be unleashed as she adds trinkets right up until midnight on Christmas Eve.

Davis figures she'll store 35 tubs of Christmas items in her home’s crawlspace after she talks herself into packing it away during the New Year.

“I’m always sad to take it down,” Davis said. “If I wouldn’t look like an idiot, I’d leave it up.”

Jumping to her feet with youthful enthusiasm, Davis quickly scurries to the kitchen to show her latest thrift store find: a “Santa’s Reunion” mug she purchased for 25 cents that perfectly matches a metal tray from 1994 displayed on her counter. The two were purchased years apart, but absolutely belong together.

Davis has a collection of dessert plates, each boasting one of Santa’s reindeer, with the exception of Dasher and Blitzen, who she longingly searches for in each thrift store she visits.

Occasionally, Davis finds new items that are too precious to pass up, such as the enormous wooden Santa head hung above her television.

She paid $44 at a Bigfork craft show and lugged her treasure around all day, she said.

Not only does Davis’ home look like a happy holiday explosion, it smells, sounds and tastes like it.

In the fragrant warmth of her kitchen, a cookie jar is stuffed with homemade oatmeal-butterscotch cookies, baked just to give away to visitors. A Christmas clock chimes a carol on the hour.

“My daughter in Philadelphia hates it because it only plays half a song. She’ll get it,” Davis said, when the time comes to give her decorations away. “I will haunt them if they yard sale all my stuff.”

Davis figures her oldest ornament is 44 years old. It’s a handmade cloth figure her children’s father drew and she stitched when her son was a baby. Running a close second is the now one-eyed snowman her daughter made in first grade. But there’s also the metal heart another daughter saved up to purchase from an antique store when the child was very small.

“They are all very, very dear to me,” Davis said.

Ceramic and glass angels congregate on a desktop. Some belonged to Davis’ mom, others were gifts. A few angels came from Joyce, a former friend and client who Davis, a housekeeper and caregiver, looked after. Davis teared up as she thought about her friend, who has since passed.

Her mom is also gone, but Davis displays small snowflake ornaments her mother lovingly stitched on plastic webbing — “and then packed them carefully in bubble wrap,” Davis said with a nostalgic chuckle.

Davis grew up in Merrillville, Indiana, one of five siblings and parents squished into an 18-by-30- foot home.

“Making room for a tree was quite the challenge,” she said. The tannenbaum went up on Christmas Eve and came down Christmas day. Decorations were limited to red doilies. It wasn’t until Davis visited her sister’s in-laws’ home that she became enamored with holiday decorations.

“It was like walking through a Christmas catalog. Every picture had a bow or a piece of holly in the corner. Even the soap was Christmas,” Davis said. “I wanted my house to look like that someday.”

Now, sitting noble in the corner of her spacious living room, her Christmas tree is flooded with gifts. Taxidermy deer, donned in Santa hats and scarves, seem to watch over the colorful menagerie. Outside, real does and bucks stroll through the snow in her Finley Point yard alongside wild turkeys, seemingly without a care in the world. Perhaps the spirit of Christmas seeped beyond the boundaries of her home, offering tidings of peace and good cheer from a loving holiday heart.

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