Shirley Squires is a 91-year-old great-great-grandmother who has found a place in her heart — if not enough space in her Guilford home — for her collection of more than 1,500 crèches.
“The presents are nice,” Squires says of Christmas, “but that’s not the true meaning for me.”
The Charlie Slate family, for its part, is a third- and fourth-generation brood from the neighboring Brattleboro area that has served up a free holiday breakfast for nearly 1,000 locals ever since its late patriarch concocted the idea 40 years ago.
“It’s nice to see the wide variety of people,” Slate’s great-granddaughter Megan Walker says, “who come from all walks of life.”
Squires and the Slate family have shared their traditions publicly for decades. Then in 2020, the Covid-19 pandemic forced both to take a break.
“We plan on being back next year,” Slate’s granddaughter Jadi Flynn said at the time, “bigger and better.”
The coronavirus had other plans. But as such celebrations again go dark, their creators nonetheless are finding light this second Covid Christmas.
‘The true meaning of Christmas’
Take Squires. She 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 a quarter-century ago after her father, husband and son died one yuletide after another.
“For a while, it made it a little hard to get into Christmas,” says Squires, whose son Ronald was the state’s first openly gay legislator before he died of an AIDS-related illness in 1993 at age 41.
Then Squires remembered the first nativity set she had bought at a five-and-dime store just after World War II. To her, it symbolized “the true meaning of Christmas”: the miracle of new life amid cold, dark times.
That’s when Squires, a lifelong parishioner of Brattleboro’s St. Michael’s Catholic Church, began scouring tag sales, flea markets, secondhand stores and websites like eBay for figurines of Mary, Joseph and baby Jesus.
Today Squires can show you the Christmas story in a 2-inch glass bottle, life-size light-up plastic and every size, shape and material in between.
Squires has crèches made of cut paper, cast pewter, carved wood and curled wire. Of ash sprung from Mount St. Helens. Of beeswax, bent nails — even a polyurethaned sandwich roll.
“I don’t know why,” she says of the latter, “but it’s still good.”
Some nativities have Indigenous figures amid wigwams and buffaloes, igloos and walruses. Or the savior as a bunny, bear cub, puppy and raccoon. Or a Mary Russian nesting egg opening up to reveal Jesus. Or three wise men sporting star-spangled red, white and blue robes.
“That was the year of 9/11,” Squires says.
Squires first wondered if such figures were sacrilegious. She stopped worrying by the time, attending crèche conventions as far away as Santa Fe, she bought an angel moose sporting a halo above its antlers.
Squires has crèches from more than 50 countries, from Aruba and Austria to Venezuela and Vietnam. 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.
Before Covid, Squires would host several hundred friends, neighbors and parochial school students for tours. The pandemic canceled those entirely last year and has curtailed viewings this month, save for VIPs such as her more than 50 children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren and great-great-grandchildren.
“I’ve got to sit down and figure it out,” Squires says when asked for specific numbers. “I’ve got close to 20 grandkids and 20 great-grandkids and I think I have two great-great-grands.”
‘Next year, hopefully …’
The Slate family’s story is equally bountiful. It began four decades ago when the late Charlie Slate drove his wife to work Christmas morning of 1981, only to realize nothing was open.
“I’m alone on Christmas Day because my wife works,” he told the local newspaper four decades ago. “I have places to go, and I just felt bad for people who have no place.”
The next year, Slate offered to cook a free breakfast for whoever wanted one and, taking over a local social club, fed 50 people ranging from the homeless to those simply hankering not to cook.
The tradition grew as Slate passed his spatula on to area resident Francis Willette in 1997 and fellow local Deirdre Baker a decade later. But continuing the effort has been challenging.
Consider Baker. When the working mother began, she figured she’d give it five years. After her fourth in 2010, she wondered if her plate was too full, as she couldn’t shake a stuffy nose. Seeing a doctor, Baker discovered she had sinus cancer. To reach it, surgeons had to sacrifice her right eye in an operation that morphed into a half-dozen, followed by six weeks of daily three-hour trips for radiation.
Wearing an eye patch, Baker nevertheless oversaw her fifth breakfast. Once disease-free, she was ready to pass on the task of coordinating volunteers and contributions to Slate’s daughter Judy Flynn.
Then Flynn was diagnosed with cancer.
Flynn, like Baker, was determined to beat it. But a week before Christmas 2013, Flynn died unexpectedly, leaving Baker to head efforts one more time before training Slate’s granddaughter Jadi Flynn and great-granddaughter Megan Walker to take over in 2014.
The mother-daughter duo, facing such obstacles as a storm on Dec. 25, 2017, that dropped nearly a foot of snow, nonetheless have led what’s now the Charlie Slate Memorial Christmas Breakfast to new heights.
In 2019, their volunteer crew of 60 served up 140 pounds of pancake mix, 270 pounds of eggs, 1,920 hash browns and 3,200 sausage links for a record 903 meals.
Organizers had hoped to hit 1,000 meals last year before the pandemic canceled both the sit-down gathering and any thoughts of distributing takeout from a kitchen too small to physically distance.
Flynn and Walker planned to bring back the breakfast this Christmas, only to see rising coronavirus cases spike that idea just before — in another last-minute jolt — Charlie Slate’s 95-year-old widow Arlene died two weeks ago.
“You’ll be missed by everyone, Gram,” Walker posted on Facebook. “Say hi to everyone up there and try not to have too much fun without us!”
Back on Earth, Flynn and Walker are aiming to host the breakfast for its 40th anniversary in 2022.
“We plan on having a celebration,” Flynn says.
As custom, it will feature pancakes — and a heaping side order of perseverance.
“Next year hopefully,” Flynn says, “we’ll be in a much better place.”
