If there’s a Christmas tree in your house that looks pretty much like all the Christmas trees you’ve ever had, maybe next year will be the time to try something different.
It’s probably too late to change things this year, but while tree design is still on people’s minds, following are some ideas that fellow Lake County residents came up with for the Festival of Trees fundraising drive by Victory Memorial Hospital in Waukegan.
Seventy designer trees were put on display at the Midlane Country Club in Waukegan, drawing 5,700 people late last month and grossing $100,000, with net proceeds of more than $56,000 going to Waukegan’s HealthReach Clinic for the needy and the hospital’s emergency care services department. The trees were auctioned, sold or raffled and now are providing holiday warmth in living rooms across the area.
Each tree was sponsored by a local business, organization or individual and uniquely designed by people ranging from professionals to school children. All designers, however, were made privy to secrets of the trade via a workshop given by David Gallaspie, a graphic designer whose family owns The Holiday Shoppe in Gurnee. (See accompanying story.)
What follows is a cross-section of the entries. Values indicate the cost of decorations and do not include the tree or indicate what they brought at auction or sale.
– Betty Burns of Lindenhurst and Alyce Brownlee of Lake Villa are artists and Christmas tree devotees. Burns, who paints in oils and exhibits at craft shows, has nostalgic memories of childhood expeditions with her family to cut live trees in the foothills of the Adirondacks in New York, where she grew up.
Brownlee, a Lake County native and village clerk of Lake Villa, said that for several years she and her husband went to Florida for the holidays, and she always tucked her 3-foot tree under her arm and took it along. “I’m still kind of Christmas crazy,” she said.
Members of the Windy Brushes of Northern Illinois, a chapter of the National Society of Tole and Decorative Painters, Burns and Brownlee enlisted the aid of their 160 fellow members to provide ornaments for the tree they designed for their sponsors, Drs. Ronald Galiene and Paul Kattner of Waukegan. Valued at $2,500, it was awarded a second-place ribbon in the 6-foot tree category. Titled “Santa Claus Comes to Town,” the tree contained 300 hand-painted Santa Clauses, each signed by the artist.
From the 16-inch plywood Santa on top with his jaunty cap to the tiny Santa faces forming the wheels of a red wagon, the jolly fellow gazed out in a variety of visages. Santa was done in porcelain, on varnished watercolor paper and in wood. He appeared in a nightshirt, as an old-fashioned St. Nicholas, with a lambswool beard and winking from a half moon.
Brownlee’s Santas were painted on wooden thread spools, and Burns made a penguin with a Santa hat on a wooden egg. The delightfully elfin tree was finished with a garland of red, green and cream-colored beads.
“We chose this theme because it is one easily executed by any artist-beginner or professional-so all our members could participate,” Burns said. “To me, Christmas centers on the tree, and I love to see the excitement of children as they watch you decorate a tree.”
– Almost 400 crayons, strung together on florist wire, formed the garland for a small tree decorated by Kaye Larsen for the Waukegan Exchange Club, which sponsored it. Before she undertook the project, Larsen, a floral designer at and owner of Larsen Florists in Waukegan, researched the organization and its goals.
“The Exchange Club has dedicated itself to ending child abuse since 1979,” she said, “so children were the focus of my design.” Titled “Color My World with Happiness-End Child Abuse,” it received a first-place ribbon in the 4-foot category and was valued at $450.
“Children are not afraid of bright colors,” Larsen said, “so I knew this would bring a smile to their faces.” In addition to the crayons, she used more than 20 8-inch cuddly teddy bears made by the North American Teddy Bear Co. of Chicago. Each bear was “mended” with a colorful Band-Aid. Underneath the tree on a hand-painted skirt a book of children’s poems lay open.
A native of Arkansas who has lived in Waukegan for 20 years, Larsen at one time decorated six trees for her own home. She is down to two, including the traditional one done especially for her own children, Katie, 17, and John Paul, 15. Each year they have received a new ornament.
“Christmas is a giving time,” Larsen said. “We try to give all year long, but we get so busy that we need one special time of the year when we reach out. This tree and this festival exemplify that for me.”
– “Heavenly but playful” was the look Joanne Larson and Mary Jane Koenig were striving for in the tree they designed for sponsors Larson Masonry of Winthrop Harbor and the Winthrop Harbor Lioness Club. What they achieved was a tree full of cherubs, kicking up their heels and turning somersaults, playing harps, looking angelic beneath golden wings or impish under crooked halos.
“Cherubs are more childlike than angels,” Koenig said. For months Larson, who is a bookkeeper, and Koenig, a retail clerk in a florist shop, have been searching boutiques, catalogs and antique shops for treasures for their tree.
Their front piece was a $65 music box cherub that played “Greensleeves,” but they also had Precious Moments collectibles, Kewpie dolls, a 1930s-era porcelain cherub and a miniature lamp with a cherub as the base. They topped the tree with a large red and gold bow and for accents used real hydrangeas, sprayed pink and “glycerated” to make them pliable. They titled their tree “Noel Cherubique.” Its value: $400.
Larson, who lives in Winthrop Harbor, and Koenig of Waukegan both look on Christmas as a celebratory time to spend with families. “One of the nice things about a tree like this is that you can add to it every year because it features collectibles,” Koenig said.
– Madeleine Fuqua of Waukegan, who for more than a year has been planning the tree she designed for sponsors Benson Electric of Waukegan and the Waukegan Garden Club Douglas Chapter, of which she is a member, grew statice in her garden specifically for the project. It ended up sprayed gold, adding delicate touches to an elegant tree featuring large pink and gold artificial lilies.
Deep red shiny balls and matte-finish pink balls were hung in clusters to accent the flowers. Fuqua, a graphic designer, used one tiny light at the very top of the tree and a few clear miniature bulbs interspersed throughout.
“Too many lights take away from a tree like this,” she said. Her tree was titled “Gilding the Lily” and was valued at $400.
Thinking about Christmas in July is not unusual for Fuqua. “My concept of the holiday comes from my Methodist grandmother, Nettie Abbott Mackey, who kept Christmas going all year long,” Fuqua said. “On Christmas afternoon, she would ask the grandchildren, `If Santa were going to knit you a sweater, what color would you want?’ Then she would beginning knitting at once in order to get all those sweaters ready in time (for next Christmas).”
Fuqua traces her expertise in gardening to her great-grandmother, Ellen Kempton Abbott, who grew medicinal herbs when she lived on Julian Street in Waukegan in the 1870s.
– “Grapes are a hot item this year,” said Bobbi Jindra of Grayslake, a floral designer at Barb’s Florist and Greenhouse in Hainesville, who used grapes as well as the popular grapevine for the $450 tree she did for sponsors Mary and James Pergander.
Mary Pergander is vice president of quality resources for Victory Memorial Hospital. Because she’s an artist first, Jindra regarded the project as a creative expression and did not look for a traditional Christmas theme. Topping the tree was a large polystyrene foam ball wrapped in lemon leaf and sprayed gold. Cherries decorated the top of the ball and clusters of red and green artificial grapes the bottom.
Natural colored wheat, which Jindra calls her “signature,” stuck out from the top of the ball like rays. The rest of the tree was decorated with full-size artifical fruit-apples, plums, pears and so forth-gilded pine cones and natural lotus pods. The grapevine was twisted round and round to form a garland.
To her, Christmas means family, peace and love. Though her design was not Christmas-oriented and bore the unlikely title “Grapes of Wrath,” Jindra said, “I undertook the project because HealthReach Clinic is about helping people, and that’s what Christmas should be.”
Each year she and her husband, Marty, go caroling in nursing homes to help spread that spirit around.
