[G]uilford resident Shirley Squires bought her first nativity set at a five-and-dime store just after World War II, only to pass it on to her daughter decades later. She did so without regret, favoring her 60 keepsake spoons and 100 Beanie Babies.
Then one particularly dark December, she saw it all in a different light.
“I didn’t like what I was collecting,” the 85-year-old recalls. “It didn’t have any meaning.”
And so the lifelong parishioner of Brattleboro’s St. Michael’s Catholic Church scoured tag sales, flea markets, second hand stores and websites like eBay for figurines of Mary, Joseph and baby Jesus. Vacationing friends brought back more as souvenirs. Acquaintances like the 99-year-old woman Squires frequently took communion to gave her their own.
Today Squires can show you The Christmas Story in a 2-inch glass bottle, in life-size light-up plastic and in every size, shape and material in between. There’s cut paper, cast pewter, carved wood, curled wire. A set made of ash sprung from Mount St. Helens. Another spun of sheep’s wool — once but no longer featuring angel wings of gold garland.
“I took it off because it looked ‘too much,’” Squires says.
Then again, she has a red, white and blue crèche with Three Wise Men sporting star-spangled robes.
“That was the year of 9/11.”
And ones that move or play music with a battery and press of a button. Ones made of beeswax, bent nails or a polyurethaned sandwich roll. (“I don’t know why, but it’s still good.”) Ones with yellow, red and brown faces framed by wigwams and buffaloes, igloos and walruses. Ones with the savior as a bunny, bear cub, puppy or raccoon.
Squires first wondered if such figures were sacrilegious. She stopped worrying by the time she started attending crèche conventions as far away as Santa Fe, where she bought an angel moose sporting a halo above its antlers.
Squires grew up in her southeastern Vermont home in the 1940s, then moved out and on to marry her husband, Maynard, and raise eight children. She settled back into the house two decades ago, after her father, husband and son died one yuletide after another.
(The latter, Ronald, the state’s first openly gay legislator, died of an AIDS-related illness in 1993 at age 41.)
“For a while it made it a little hard to get into Christmas,” she says.
That’s when Squires started building her collection. By setting up nativity sets for 20 grandchildren and 24 great-grandchildren, she’s reminded of “the true meaning of Christmas”: the miracle of birth in the midst of darkness. And so she exhibits Russian nesting eggs with Mary opening up to reveal Jesus, as well as figurines from more than 50 countries ranging from Aruba and Austria to Venezuela and Vietnam.
Squires has to start each September, unpacking not only crèches but also mangers threaded into tablecloths and throw pillows, hooked into rugs and tissue dispensers, etched onto light-switch plates, embossed on candles and cookie jars, swimming in snow globes and pictured in 150 books and another 150 ornaments.
The collection fills her kitchen, dining room, living room, sunroom, staircase and two second-floor bedrooms. She displays a 180-piece set of Fontanini figurines in a sandbox she has built atop her bed.
Or what was her bed — Squires now sleeps on the downstairs sofa. When her menagerie threatened to take over that, she moved the overflow to her garage, converted into a floor-to-ceiling showroom. Even so, she barely can squeeze in the four new crèches she purchased just this past week.
“I’m a little more picky,” says Squires, wearing a nativity-theme vest, “but I won’t say no.”
Squires figures she’ll host about 300 friends, neighbors and parochial school students who make arrangements to visit before she starts packing away her treasures each February.
“I never imagined there were so many different types of nativity scenes,” she says, fingering the fur of an Eskimo Mary from Alaska.
Their collector, however, is one of a kind.
