Christmas village a reminder of why holiday traditions so important

Christmas village a reminder of why holiday traditions so important
 
By Cary Littlejohn
Gillette News Record
Via Wyoming News Exchange
 
GILLETTE — Holiday traditions persist as a bridge to the past. They allow us to pay respects for those who brought us up with their reflected values. Traditions transcend time and space, putting us immediately around a childhood dining room table or reuniting us with absent relatives.
Maybe it’s a particular dish that’s just like a beloved grandmother made that fills the house with just the right smell and tastes even richer than it did in youth. Maybe it’s the way gifts are exchanged that reminds us of extended family gatherings with cousins and aunts and uncles and nieces and nephews.
Traditions are what distinguish the holidays from mere circled dates on a calendar.
One need not remind Hazel Vassar about the importance of holiday traditions.
While Gillette residents gathered together for their Thanksgiving meals, Vassar began her four-day tradition at the Campbell County Courthouse: building a winter wonderland, a Christmas village, in miniature.
Vassar’s holiday tradition becomes a part of everyone else’s holiday season since the sprawling Vassar Village, as it’s known among locals, is a can’t-miss Christmas classic in Gillette. Whether a destination unto itself or just something unexpectedly beautiful to see while conducting routine business at the courthouse, the village is a tiny, yet sprawling, encapsulation of all there is to love about the holidays and winter in Wyoming.
So far, 2020 has been a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad year and has upended many traditions.
The same is true for the state at large and the whole country as well. Thanksgiving saw a tug-of-war match between the desire to keep loved ones and strangers safe and downsizing holiday celebrations by staying home versus the engrained, almost reflexive habits of “this is what we do for the holidays” mindsets.
Vassar did not escape 2020 without her share of loss. 
Her loving husband, Don, her constant companion and right-hand helper in building the miniature wonderland, died in June. The only time they didn’t construct Vassar Village was last year, when both were struggling with health issues. Don’s issues had them making numerous trips to Billings, Montana.
An outpouring of support for the village came last year from strangers and courthouse employees and the Campbell County Commission.
This year, this terrible, horrible, no good, very bad year took much from Vassar and it became a natural question to wonder if she’d put herself through the stress and strain of rebuilding her winter wonderland.
It would have been understandable if inertia, the desire for a body at rest to stay at rest, had set in and Vassar simply said no more. She’d given of herself for nearly two decades for no compensation or expectation of notoriety.
But Vassar didn’t for a minute consider not completing the village this year.
In fact, she said she felt “more incentive” because of how much had been canceled this year already. “It really gave me more incentive that people look forward to it. I could not disappoint them, I just couldn’t.”
Vassar has more stories than she can remember from people who gazed in wonder at Vassar Village and felt something stir in them.
“One year, I had one lady come in, and I usually worked until the wee hours of Monday morning and then I’d come into work,” Vassar said. “So we had worked and I’d got home and showered, cleaned up and came back to work, and the doors had opened up.
“I was walking around, and this lady was standing over at the side. She was just looking. I said, ‘Do you like it?’ And she looked up at me and said, ‘Honey, if I don’t have another bit of Christmas, I’ve had mine this year.’”
It’s stories like these, as much as any sense of personal tradition, that push Vassar onward.
“I mean, there’s just millions of stories you hear out there,” Vassar said. “I just can’t quit until I can’t do it. I just can’t. Too many people get the joy.”
Vassar Village has been a staple of the community for about 20 years, but like so many traditions, Vassar can’t remember exactly how or when it started. She said she’s been collecting the pieces for at least 25 years and spent countless thousands of dollars on them.
The tradition began during the days when she roamed the courthouse as an employee, which she did for 39 years until 2015, because the place was like a second home to her and its people were a large extended family.
It’s a living art installation in the sense that it’s never the same as it was the year before. Vassar maps out the layout once, setting the small houses and Santa’s workshop and skating rinks to make sure they look right before she’ll pick them all up again to make sure where and how strings of lights need to run and do it all over again. When each house, building, tree and figurine, there are many hundreds of pieces that must be individually placed.
“It’s like a major jigsaw puzzle,” Vassar said.
The display space is a low-slung L-shaped platform just inside the main entrance to the courthouse. The work wreaks havoc on Vassar’s knees and back, especially after four days of stooping over it.
“Oh, (it’s) horrible, just horrible,” she said of the aches and pains.
On the Friday morning after Thanksgiving, this year’s village was at most a third completed, which was still a lot of individual pieces in place. But it only served to highlight just how large her collection of miniatures must be.
“There’s a big space in the basement plumb-full of this stuff,” said Tammy Eastin, Vassar’s niece who was helping her that day.
“Yeah, I could fill this probably three times, full,” Vassar said, pointing at the display space. “Plus, I have storage units that have more.”
Her newest addition is a tree adorned in crystal to pair with a crystal palace that she rarely sets out. She said she was just trying to do something to “break up the ho-hum” of this year’s display. Though well-established, tradition need not be stale.
Holiday traditions persist as a bridge to the past. They’re a solemn admission that we’re not interested in wholly new ways of doing things; the ways we’ve always done them have served us well. They’re an anchor in a storm, and when a year like 2020 comes along to thrash us around, to take so much from so many, traditions are a semblance of normalcy. They remind us of better days and that better days are still ahead of us.
Hazel Vassar knows this all too well as her traditions have become our traditions.
But a smaller conception of family will undoubtedly be on her mind when Dec. 25 rolls around. It’s Christmas Day, and therefore a natural time to think of family and take stock of who’s there and who isn’t.
For Vassar, Dec. 25 isn’t just Christmas Day, and that fact makes Don’s absence all the more significant.
Everything in front of Vassar, every tradition, large and small, will have foundations in that day. In addition to Christmas Day, Dec. 25 would have been her and Don’s 57th wedding anniversary.