Holiday hustle and bustle fosters good cheer

Author: Lea Calderon-Guthe

It is the most wonderful time of the year, and the town of Middlebury is ready to celebrate. Wreaths ring the lampposts on Main Street, lights adorn the rooftops of the buildings in Marble Works and a combination of the two have decked out the gazebo on the town green. Add in this week's snow, and Middlebury is a postcard-perfect image of the holidays.

"I love seeing all the lights up, all the decorations, and just walking around downtown, looking in the little stores," Cary Beckwith of Brandon, Vt. said.

Beckwith, with 11-year-old Nathaniel Laughlin, was perusing the many gingerbread houses on display at the Vermont Folklife Center on Main Street through Dec. 22. The Ninth Annual Gingerbread House Exhibit and Competition is one of Middlebury's unique holiday celebrations, a fact not lost on Beckwith and Laughlin.

"We've come for many years, maybe three years or four years,' Beckwith said. "It's a holiday tradition now."

The houses, all made locally, range from elaborate gingerbread castles with ice cream cone turrets to 'green' gingerbread architecture: green-frosted houses in the shape of leaves. There is a pirate ship with Fruit Roll-Up sails, a tiny gingerbread aquarium with real glass walls, an entire miniature gingerbread town and a gingerbread rendition of "The Christmas Bus," the children's holiday performance that was shown at Middlebury Union High School Dec. 1-3. There is even a set of two gingerbread stores with signs on their roofs that read "Big box store (Profits sent away)" and "Local owner (Profits stay local)." Jan Albers, the executive director of the Henry Sheldon Museum on Park Street, echoed this sentiment.

"We're hoping people will shop locally and not do all of their shopping from catalogs and big box stores and things," Albers said. "I think it's a good year, that people downtown have a good feeling about things this year."

Drawing people downtown, the Henry Sheldon Museum hosted an open house Dec. 1-2 to show off its collection of dollhouses, festive Christmas decorations and a large, elaborate model train set-up. Sunday afternoon, Stephanie Strohm '08 set the mood with a few Christmas classics on the piano in the front parlor of the Judd-Harris house while Stephen Lowe, at that time known as Santa Claus, mingled with the family groups milling around. Children colored-in paper gingerbread men before racing upstairs to see the trains, a Middlebury holiday staple for the past 15 years. Strohm cited the open house as the real start of the Christmas season for her.

"One of my favorite things is decorating [the Judd-Harris house] for Christmas because we get all the giant boxes of the greenery and presents and everything out of the attic," Strohm said. "I just feel like it really transforms the house, and once all the lights are up I feel like it's really ready for Christmas to start."

Albers thought it was the whole weekend that put the town in the holiday mood.

"I think when they have all of these different things at the same time is kind of fun," Albers said. "It always gets everyone in the holiday spirit to have the open house here and the Folk Life Center and Santa is at the Community House. It's kind of the big kick-off for the holiday season in Middlebury."

Organizing the open house at the Henry Sheldon Museum, including the decorating and especially setting up the trains, was no small ordeal. It took several members of the Middlebury College lacrosse team to carry the many heavy wooden platforms that the multi-level model railroad rests upon up the stairs, and an extra level of track meant a lot of paper-machÈ had to be added to the 'mountain,' which was the tallest it has ever been.

"Everything's taken down from the attic in November," said Tom Ward, one of several 'conductors' in the train room who helped to set up the display. "It takes about three weeks to put it up, but only one to take it down."

The effort that went into the set-up was clearly worth it with a total museum visitor count of over 700 people on Saturday alone, making it an above-average year according to Albers. Another plus to this year's open house was the number of newcomers.

"We got a lot of people this year who said they'd never been in the museum before, so that's always good when we can draw in some new people," Albers said. "A lot of local people come every year, a lot of families bring their little kids in to see the trains every year, but we always get some new ones, too."

Beckwith and Laughlin are two of those regulars that come to see the trains as soon as the holiday season rolls around, though they missed the open house itself this year.

"We have gone to the museum ever since [Nathaniel] was very little, but we missed it today," Beckwith said. "We used to go to see the trains, and we used to have a train that went around our tree, but then it broke. This year we went to see 'The Christmas Bus.'"

Besides the open house at the Henry Sheldon Museum, the Gingerbread Exhibition and "The Christmas Bus," Albers thought the general town dÈcor was better this year, and that having the Vermont Folk Life Center so close to the museum, with both of them so close to downtown Middlebury, was creating a sense of complete community celebration.

"The Vermont Folk Life Center has moved a couple doors down, so a lot of people go back and forth who might have made it to one but not to both of our events this weekend," Albers said. "It's really good to have another reason for people to come downtown, to go to a museum. I think we all feel that downtown Middlebury is on an upswing - it was in a little lull for a couple of years, and now the shop fronts that were empty are getting filled up again, and stores have coordinated their displays a little better, so it looks really pretty."

The town does not celebrate by itself, however. Middlebury College plays a part in the festivities for many families, including the Beckwiths.

"The other thing we usually do is go to some sort of performance up at the College," Beckwith said. "We went to WinterSongs last night, and last year we went to the readings and music, Readings for the Advent or something like that. I really loved the WinterSongs last night, they were really lovely."