fairlawn: Rose Ann Mallardi Shirley still remembers the awe she felt when someone would lift her up to see the village of tiny people that decorated her grandmother’s fireplace mantel every Christmas.
That feeling never went away. Now Shirley is sharing it with new generations of her family as the caretaker of the village, handcrafted by her aunt the year Shirley was born.
The aunt, the late Teresa Mallardi Mastin, fashioned the miniature figures in 1940 out of pipe cleaners, scraps of fabric and “I don’t know what else,” Shirley said. The family had little money, she said, but what her aunt did have was artistic talent and the time to express it in those days before TV.
The figures with their stuffed-fabric heads and expressive, hand-drawn faces came out every Christmas to decorate the Mallardi family’s mantel in North Hill. They were perched on a cotton-covered base and were backed by a blue crepe-paper sky with silver stick-on stars, Shirley recalled.
After Christmas, they were packed away in a box that Mastin marked with the words “The Village People” long before the kitschy disco group made that name mainstream.
The whimsical figures populate an imaginary village that’s now set up each year on a table in the family room of Shirley’s home in Fairlawn. There’s a priest in his black vestments and biretta with a tiny pompom on top. There are sled riders on a cotton-covered hill, boys throwing snowballs and a fisherman smoking a tiny pipe, his fishing pole dangling over a mirror lake where skaters glide. There’s a boy in earmuffs with a newspaper under his arm, apparently made from a piece of a 1940 periodical.
The figures are painstakingly pinned to a Styrofoam layer under the cotton batting to keep them upright.
Altogether Mastin created 33 people, a project that took her 80 hours. Eventually she gave them to Shirley and was thrilled her niece wanted to carry on the tradition.
Shirley has since added buildings, trees and other accessories to the scene and created a blue fabric backdrop that a friend outfitted with twinkling lights to look like a starry sky. But it’s the handmade people she treasures.
“They are to me very precious,” she said.
Shirley is pleased her aunt got to see the village set up in her house before she died in 2008 at age 86. She smiled at the memory of her aunt’s micromanagement.
The first year she saw it, her aunt asked, “Where’s the hill?” The second year she remarked, “That tree could use a redbird.”
“I put the moon up [on the backdrop] because I didn’t want her to tell me I needed the moon,” Shirley said with a laugh.
Setting up the village takes a day, the most labor-intensive of the extensive holiday decorations that adorn Shirley’s house. “And I think I’ll be sweeping tinsel and little flakes of snow till July,” she said.
She considers the effort worthwhile, though, because she loves sharing the village with her children, her grandchildren and the other members of what she describes as her large Italian Catholic family. Among them are the female cousins and second cousins she invites to her home for a Christmas party every year, just to keep the family ties strong.
The village will remain a family legacy, she said. She has already promised it to her granddaughter Rosie Holcomb, who shares her grandmother’s love for the scene.
“My greatest joy is building memories for my children and grandchildren,” she said, “and this is part of it.”
Mary Beth Breckenridge can be reached at 330-996-3756 or mbrecken@thebeaconjournal.com. You can also become a fan on Facebook at http://tinyurl.com/mbbreck, follow her on Twitter @MBBreckenridge and read her blog at www.ohio.com/blogs/mary-beth.