Brenda Fargo remembers the thrill of drinking in the holiday windows that brightened downtown when she was a child.
She wants others to know that joy. So every year, she turns the windows of Akron’s Mayflower Manor into a sweeping depiction of the scenes surrounding Christ’s birth.
This is the 14th year Fargo has fashioned the downtown display, a miniature re-creation of Middle Eastern life 2,000 years ago. She populates the landscape with busy merchants, kids at play, mischievous animals and, of course, a couple of nervous but wonder-struck parents hovering over their newborn in a crude stable.
Fargo arranges the display herself, using more than 400 Fontanini Nativity figures she’s collected, 75 or 80 buildings and thousands of itty-bitty accessories — miniature fruits, teeny cooking pans, minuscule water jugs and the like.
The scene depicts a bustling Bethlehem and the surrounding countryside, as well as the rural site of the angel’s appearance to the shepherds and the far-away homeland of the three kings.
It’s her creative outlet, she said. Throughout the year, she crafts buildings and other pieces for the display in the sun room she’s turned into a workshop in her Green home.
Then, come November, she throws herself into setting up the display in time for Thanksgiving, devoting eight or nine 10-hour days to the process.
“Could I do it faster? Probably. Do I want to? No,” she said during a break from her meticulous work about a week before Thanksgiving. She enjoys the process of bringing the Christmas story to life, one tiny element at a time — and never in the same way from one year to the next.
She’s particular enough that she doesn’t even want two figures alike, so she’ll paint duplicates to differentiate them.
She started constructing her own buildings when Fontanini stopped making larger, lighted structures, and her husband, Michael, uses a 3-D printer to create some of the tiny accessories.
Even rocks Fargo has collected in her travels make their way into the display. You can’t see that she’s written their places of origin on the undersides.
Family affair
Fargo’s husband and their 15-year-old son, Justin, pitch in with the heavy lifting and some other chores. And this year, Fargo got help from Katie Cook, an art student at Cuyahoga Valley Christian Academy who painted a mountainous horizon and night sky on the plywood backdrops.
Katie, a sophomore from Cuyahoga Falls, said she’d never taken on a project of that scale. Her biggest challenge was blending paint colors to create the multihued effect of a sky just after sunset — a task that wasn’t easy using latex wall paint, she said.
“This was huge. Three huge walls. It was a lot more than I expected,” she said with a laugh, although she’s glad she had the opportunity,.
Fargo’s fascination with all things miniature has its roots in a family trip to Chicago when she was a teenager.
There she was smitten by Colleen Moore’s Fairy Castle, a downscaled dream house at the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago.
She was so enamored that she made dollhouse building her hobby.
That interest faded when she went to college, but it resurfaced when she stopped at a Christmas store in Maryland during a business trip in 1999.
The store had an entire village that matched the Fontanini creche she’d just purchased, and she had to have it.
“So I came home from the business trip with two boxes … and it’s kind of developed since then,” she said.
Changing homes
When the display outgrew the Fargos’ living room, they moved it to their church, Millheim Baptist in Springfield Township.
Then, in 2003, they got permission to use a former storefront in the Mayflower building, with windows at the corner of Main and State streets.
It’s a visible spot for downtown visitors, who often show up in family clusters, take pictures and make a game of searching for specific elements in the display.
Sometimes Fargo will eavesdrop, unseen behind the backdrop.
“When I can hear the people out there looking for things, that is so gratifying,” she said. “… It makes it totally worth it.”
Mary Beth Breckenridge can be reached at 330-996-3756 or mbrecken@thebeaconjournal.com. You can also become a fan on Facebook at www.facebook.com/MBBreckABJ, follow her on Twitter @MBBreckABJ