First, advent calendars; then gnomes; then the tree; and then Christmas itself. Only as an adult did I discover that one element in this sequence separated us from other New York families. In my early childhood, my mother, awakened to a novel festive touch by a Swiss friend with Swedish tastes, had collected more than a hundred little hand-carved wooden figures — Scandinavian gnomes, dressed in red, mostly with cotton-wool hair.
She grouped them so that they seemed to be in the middle of busy lives: old gnomes who might have been married grandparents rocked in neighboring chairs; young ones were posed as if courting; a band placed in the front hall boasted musical instruments.
For three weeks a year, they peeked out from behind books in the library, winked from the windowsills, leaned casually atop a stack of sheet music on the piano. The ones on sleds congregated on the side table in the dining room, which had a surface of snow-like white marble, and the ones lugging sacks occupied the living room coffee table, as though trudging down from the North Pole. The population increased every year, and so did the collective narrative of the setups.
A few years after my mother died in 1991, my brother and I divided up whatever my father did not want to keep. My brother and his wife got most of the jewelry and my husband and I landed the gnomes. Every year in early December, I position them around the house, trying to recreate the spirit of my mother’s tableaux.
During the pandemic, I discovered a world of online gnome dealers who specialized in the whimsical heyday when my mother collected the most quirky and original ones — part of a tradition that died in the 1980s, when mass production took over. I doubled her collection (we have over a thousand now) and received a discount with two galleries in Latvia and one in Helsinki.
My son would say, “Buying yourself more dolls?” Later, he would add, “I hope this addiction of yours is not consuming my college tuition.” When Christmas rolled around, however, he and my daughter and our friends acknowledged that no place was merrier than our house. “They’re kind of tacky,” a Danish friend remarked when I tried to find some in Copenhagen. “Here, perhaps,” I said. “But at my house, they are quirky and charming.”
In my involvement with the Metropolitan Museum of Art as a trustee, my husband, John, and I attended a dinner in Zurich that included ample quantities of remarkable wines and the city’s most prominent art collectors. As the tipsy evening wore on, someone turned to my husband and asked, rather grandly, “And remind me — what do you collect?” There was a moment of silence before John offered hesitantly, “Andrew collects Christmas gnomes.” I could only nod solemnly when asked whether they had been appropriately cataloged.
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