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It’s beginning to look a lot like more nutcrackers

Second-annual expanded Steubenville Nutcracker Village and Advent Market by Trinity Health System coming

NUTCRACKER MAGIC — Steubenville businessman Mark Nelson chats with his daughter, Therese, during a break in action to completing 70 new nutcrackers that will be added to 37 existing ones for the second-annual Steubenville Nutcracker Village and Advent Market presented by Trinity Health System. Nelson’s business is the creator of the nutcrackers with Therese engrossed in designing and decorating, painting and personalizing them. Free and open to the public, this year’s expanded offering, which will be on display day and night Nov. 22 through Jan. 8 is cause for excitement for Judy Bratten, executive director of Historic Fort Steuben, and Jerry Barilla, board president, as planning continues for the festivities to unfold at Fort Steuben Park and Visitor Center at 120 S. Third St., Steubenville. -- Janice Kiaski

STEUBENVILLE — Most every day is a nutcracker day for 21-year-old Therese Nelson.

Since January,  the daughter of small business owners Mark and Gretchen Nelson of Steubenville has been engrossed in designing and decorating, painting and personalizing life-size nutcrackers — 70 of them to be specific.

They’re all new additions for the second-annual Steubenville Nutcracker Village and Advent Market presented by Trinity Health System and born out of a partnership between Nelson’s of Steubenville and the Old Fort Steuben Project. It will unfold at Fort Steuben Park and Visitor Center, 120 S. Third St., where the newbie nutcrackers will be joined by 37 other nutcrackers from the initial attraction that last year lured thousands to the downtown.

Free and open to the public, this year’s expanded offering presented by Trinity Health System will be on display day and night Nov. 22 through Jan. 8.

The deadline pressure is on, but Therese (pronounced Terr-ezz) Nelson is used to it.

DESIGNING WAYS

So much time with so many nutcrackers is no cause for nightmares.

“No, not at all,” smiles artist Therese Nelson. “I love them. It’s kind of a large focus in my life, but I still love them. They’re a lot of fun.”

Designing and painting the nutcrackers that represent well-known characters, familiar personalities, literary heroes, mascots or professions has been all consuming since the beginning of 2016.

“I don’t do the carving part, but when we started last year, we carved out a whole bunch before we had designs even picked out, so once we had them carved out, we had this part (designing) and had to turn it into a nutcracker until people starting telling me what they wanted,” Therese said.

Last year, all 37 nutcrackers were produced and designed under a tight timetable — from the beginning of November to the beginning of December.

“This year we had a little bit more time, and we’ve certainly taken our time with them and made some pretty elaborate nutcrackers,” she said.

That includes a few sets of nutcrackers, ones that represent the “Wizard of Oz,” for example, complete with Dorothy, the Tin Man, Scarecrow and the Cowardly Lion. Then there’s the Rat Pack with a Dean Martin who’ll actually croon a tune as people walk by it.

Among her new favorites this year, she says, are Clark Kent and Lois Lane, sponsored by the Herald-Star and The Weirton Daily Times, respectively, and a chef/baker sponsored by Naples.

“This year we started in January, but it’s a crazy work week,” Therese said, noting nutcracker attention comes with some volunteer help and in the midst of work responsibilities with the family business.

“I talk to all the customers. We design it for them. I usually draw them out on paper and send them images, they approve them, and I send it to the master carver, and he gets them to a boring state of not decorated and then we bring them down here, and I spray paint them and bedazzle them, add hair, and they’re good to go,” Therese said of the production process.

The average height of a nutcracker is about 6 feet and weighs less than 50 pounds, but there are some shorter ones in the mix, including a 4-foot Mother Teresa, new to this year’s offerings, and a Charlie Brown. A taller one appropriately is a Franciscan University Barons basketball player.

Sometimes sponsors have a vision for their nutcracker, other times not. “Sometimes they have no idea what they want, and we try and make creative suggestions,” she said.

Sponsors run the gamut from businesses and service organizations to schools, clubs and individuals.

“It’s our art project, our nutcrackers, so we get to decide what they look like,” she said.

The first nutcracker last year was named Junior.

“He is the most basic traditional nutcracker you’ve ever seen. The first one we ever did we based it off a piece of clip art and printed off a life-size, 6-foot version of it and hung it up in our living room, and we looked at it and studied it,” she said.

“He is just a really, really simple, really traditional nutcracker,” she said, recalling her younger siblings’ animated reaction to the nutcrackers.

That joy and reaction of people seeing them all makes Therese enjoy the project all the more.

“They kind of are a painstaking process,” she said of the start-to-finish production a nutcracker entails.

But it’s been worth it, making all this company for Junior.

LOOKING FORWARD TO NOVEMBER

Judy Bratten, executive director of Historic Fort Steuben, and Jerry Barilla, board president, are extra excited about the approach of the holiday season.

Come November, downtown Steubenville will be transformed into a holiday destination as the second-annual Steubenville Nutcracker Village and Advent Market presented by Trinity Health System unfolds. More than 100 life-size nutcrackers will be on display day and night from Light-Up Night on Nov. 22, through Jan. 8.

The expanded Advent Market featuring food, local artisans, Christmas gifts, hayrides and music, will be open Nov. 25-27; Dec. 2-4; Dec. 9-11; and Dec. 16-18. Hours are 4 p.m. to 9 p.m. on Friday and Saturday and 1 p.m. to 6 p.m. on Sunday.

The nutcrackers designed and fabricated locally will be beneath “the twinkling arches of Fort Steuben Park,” affording many a photo opportunity with the likes of Dr. Who, St. Francis, Scrooge, the Italian Gondolier, Patrolman Holiday, the Phantom of the Opera and Steubenville’s own Dean Martin.

Nutcrackers also will be among the holiday-themed decor in the Fort Steuben Visitor Center’s Exhibit Hall where a Christmas wonderland features a variety of Christmas trees, retro toys, music and novelties in addition to the opportunity to write letters to Santa and purchase collectible nutcrackers, books, puzzles and gift items available in the gift shop open daily from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.

The Advent Market on those four weekends will feature artisans in chalets offering specialty crafts and baked goods, doll clothes, wood crafts, local honey, wooden toys, grapevine wreaths and locally produced Nutcracker souvenirs. There will be food booths and live entertainment.

The annual Sights and Sounds of Christmas parade on Dec. 10 will feature the theme “Nutcracker Magic” and is expected to include more than 80 units.

New this year is an original musical production based on the Steubenville Nutcracker Village and using the familiar melodies of Tchaikovsky’s “Nutcracker Suite.” Created by John and Von McGeehan Holmes, “The Wooden Heart Follies” will run four Sundays — Nov. 27, Dec. 4, Dec. 11 and Dec. 18 — at the Steubenville Masonic Temple, 227 N. Fourth St. Show time is 2 p.m. Tickets are $7 for adults; $4 for students; and free for those younger than 6. Tickets can be purchased at the door or in advance at the Fort Steuben Visitor Center or online at http://woodenheartfollies.brownpapertickets.com.

Barilla says it all adds up to something quite magical for visitors to downtown Steubenville, the city he loves.

HOW THE NUTCRACKER VILLAGE

IDEA ORIGINATED

“We had been wanting to do something different in Steubenville to make a new attraction,” explained Bratten. “I had been to Cambridge a few times to see their Victorian Dickens Christmas so I said to Jerry, ‘You have to see this.'”

So in January 2015 they did. “We drove out there and walked up and down the streets and looked at all the figures and the scenes that they had portrayed. He was blown away by it all, how amazing it was, and we stopped in at the stores and talked to the people. I remember Jerry asked one of the women in a bakery — ‘Has this made a difference in your business?’ — and she said, ‘Oh, yes.’ And that was what we were looking at — not just something to be fun and an attraction, but something to stimulate business,” Bratten said.

“Downtown Cambridge has a lot of the same buildings we have, just as old, but they’ve figured out a way to bring life to it, spark it up and decorate so when people come downtown, they don’t get a feel of it being an old downtown, but a vibrant downtown even though the buildings are still old just like ours,” Bratten continued.

“So we came back and tried to rack our brains, what to do, and Jerry was taking down the Christmas ornaments. We always decorate for Christmas in the Visitor Center, and Jerry was taking things down, and we had a number of nutcrackers, different sized ones, and he was putting one back into the box and the box said nutcracker village,” she said.

Barilla said the nutcrackers that were his sister’s were on the post-holiday verge of being packed away, his mind preoccupied with how to do that. The sight of “nutcracker village” information on the box flap made him stop, read, and think.

“I said, wow, this is it. We could be the nutcracker village for Steubenville,” Barilla recalled, making a mental and written note of a vision with potential.

“I wrote a note to Judy, this is what we can do, and she ran with it,” he said.

“I think we were doing a wrapup for the parade or something, and we mentioned that to Mark (Nelson) and talked about how can we get these big nutcrackers, because they’re very expensive if you try to order them, especially if you custom order them, and Mark said let me see what we can do, and with his creativity and his staff, they had all the woodworking equipment, and they could modify it to work with another material, so that they could produce the nutcrackers,” Bratten said.

The conversation ultimately produced a prototype but something beyond that, too — a seed for success.

“We were so excited — here was a lifesize nutcracker,” Barilla said.

“Mark’s daughter Therese is very talented. She picked up on it right away and the staff figured out how to produce them, and she and a crew would paint them.

“We had no idea how this would go,” Bratten said.

HOLD ON A MINUTE

Barilla squashed Bratten’s enthusiasm initially when he told her to refrain from publicizing outside the local area.

“I said, hold off, we don’t know what’s going to happen. We have no idea how this is going to turn out, so she held off in doing that. Also the Advent Village, the chalets, Mark Nelson had asked me a year prior if we could do an Advent Market around the fountain, and I told him no. To be honest I didn’t have a knowledge of what that even meant, and I just felt it wasn’t the place for something like that, but once this started, he asked again if we could do this Advent Market, and so I said, ‘Yes, we’ll go ahead and do it,'” Barilla said.

“We threw together 12 huts very quickly. This was done really last minute, and then, too, we wanted to light them up some way, so we ran to M&M and got spotlights and ran wires all over the ground and tried to put a light on each of the nutcrackers. We had like 37, and we were way overextended on the power. We had wires going everywhere,” he said.

Now hoops erected will be lit, and every nutcracker will have a spotlight on it. “Everything will be LED lighting so we can reduce the draw of consumption and so now nothing is going to be on the ground,” he said.

Help from the IBEW Local Union 246 constitutes one source of help for the project that’s appreciated, according to Bratten and Barilla, along with the Center of Music and Art, Cattrell Cos. Inc., Tri-State Financial Services, Weirton Medical Center, Sterling’s Auto Body and Paint Inc., Diocese of Steubenville, Crestview Veterinary Clinic, First Choice American Community Federal Credit Union, Mosti Funeral Home, Valley Converting, Barium and Chemicals, Quik Mart & More, Bug Busters Pest Control Service, Pugliese Charitable Trust and WTOV-TV.

THE NUTCRACKER SHOP

Within a matter of weeks, Mark Nelson, who operates Nelson’s Fine Art and Gifts out of the former Lincoln School where the nutcrackers are produced, will be opening something new in the former Anna Kay’s location at 155 N. Fourth St.

“It will be called the Nutcracker Shop, because we’re going to move some of the nutcrackers down here to complete their painting and creation, and then we’ll have Christmas items for sale, and nutcracker souvenirs as well available here,” Nelson said.

“The whole nutcracker project is to help benefit Steubenville,” Nelson said. “It’s really to create an attraction that draws people to Steubenville, specifically to the downtown to help in the revitalization of the downtown, so the Nutcracker Shop is just a small way of contributing in another way to that effort,” he explained. “It’s our small attempt to attracting people to the downtown,” he added.

“Many people haven’t heard of the nutcracker project, yet many have and came to it multiple times last year,” he said.

“Last year, we had over 10,000 people come through the downtown. That’s a significant amount of people, significant enough we’re interested in opening more businesses in the community, so the Nutcracker Shop would be another reason to come down and Christmas shop with handmade items and all things that are made in Steubenville,” he said.

Nelson said he got involved in the whole nutcracker project “kind of by accident I suppose.”

Jerry Barilla and Judy Bratten of Historic Fort Steuben had returned from historic Cambridge in January 2015, which hosts a Dickens Victorian Village in November and December. It features more than 180 life-size characters in nearly 93 scenes from Charles Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol” or “one resembling merry old England.”

Nelson said Barilla suggested maybe Steubenville could do something with nutcracker displays.

“Literally that day I went home and had my daughter Madeline (the Nelson company’s graphic artist) print off a life-size picture off the Internet, and I studied it all weekend and basically we hung it on the wall in the living room, and I sat down off and on in my easy chair and studied it and basically by Monday had figured out we could actually manufacture these life-size,” he said.

“I gave the challenge to my oldest brother Mike, our shop manager, and Mike and I came up with how to make the first one and used that prototype to design tooling and casting molds and then a whole kind of program developed off of that.

“It was literally within weeks of them visiting we had our first prototype, and from there we laid out the plan on how to move ahead and came up with 37 last year, including our first guy, Junior, our sample,” he continued.

“Once the mold was done, it was a matter of changing them up and making them come alive, to make them work with local people to engage them in the creation process, so we’re all co-creators of a beauitful space in Steubenville that we can all take pride in,” he said. “It’s not just a one-person or a one-company thing but rather a community event that everybody can draw pride in and have a part in, and that is what sponsorships allowed.”

WELL RECEIVED

The public response to the display last year floored Nelson.

“I was totally surprised,” Nelson said, anticipating moderate interest at best.

The nutcracker project last year was a “down-to-the-wire” undertaking. “We had a busy year because we were a major manufacturer for Pope Francis’ visit to the United States. That occupied about three months of our time, and then we got done with that and pushed forward on the nutcracker project,” he explained.

So, too, were the more than 10 chalets he and son Gabe erected at the fort over Thanksgiving weekend. The small booths enabled artisans to offer specialty goods and constituted a last-minute attraction to complement the nutcrackers display.

Nelson said an open house held last October at the Lincoln School facility gave people a glimpse of the nutcracker project and prompted 30 sponsorships.

“Once people were able to see them, they were able to get behind the idea,” he said.

As the 2016 nutcracker orders are being finished, orders already have been placed for 2017.

“I set the goal early in the year to get our numbers up to over a hundred,” Nelson said of the 2016 plans.

“It takes a few days to make one basically start to finish. They are all hand made, every detail is hand made from the sketching of it to the choosing of the colors to the actual carving of them is all a hundred percent hand made, 100 percent done in Steubenville,” he said, noting he often gets stopped and asked ‘How’s it going?'” the “it” a direct reference to nutcracker production.

He said daughter Therese “really enjoys contributing to the community this way. This is her hometown. My wife and I originally are from other states — me Missouri , Gretchen, Michigan. We came here because of Franciscan (university) and stayed, but our nine kids have all been born in Steubenville, and this is their hometown, and I’m proud as a dad to be able to help my kids create a community and contribute to the community that they call home, making it a fun, great place to live really.”

The economic impact locally from the Nutcracker Village is nothing to sneeze at, Nelson agrees.

“Last year the impact was over $100,000 to the downtown community based on sales we know of from vendors at the fort and the gift shop at the fort and vendors at chalets, and a number of people who ate at restaurants during their experience. I would say that it was well over a hundred thousand dollars of economic impact for the downtown. It’s a good start,” he said.

His family’s involvement in the community is just their way of contributing to making Steubenville a better place, according to Nelson.

And the community needs many more people to contribute in their own way, he added.

“Steubenville is really a canvas waiting to be painted, and this is our way of painting, and everyone is called to contribute to the community in some way. I encourage everyone to find out what their talents are and to give to the community in whatever the talents they have to create the best community. The best city in the entire United States, that’s what I want Steubenville to be, the best place to live. That’s what it’s all about really.”

NUTS ABOUT NUTCRACKERS

“In the first year when we talked about having life-sized nutcrackers, there were jokes, all the nuts in Steubenville, you know, all that kind of stuff, and then once they saw it, it just blew everybody away,” Judy Bratten said.

“It was so impressive. We were blown away. Every time a new nutcracker came in, it was exciting to see how they had done it,” she said.

The display brought to light that many people had nutcracker collections, according to Jerry Barilla.

“That’s the cool thing about it,” Barilla said. “We’ve had people tell us they’ve had as high as 500 nutcrackers. People collect them.”

It all stacks up to a holiday experience Barilla describes as “magical.”

“It was magical,” he said. “The nice thing about all of this is that if you came down and saw this and were impressed, you may have called your sister or brother or niece or nephew or whoever and you returned. We’ve had people here two times, three times, four times, they kept coming back with a relative or friend just to show them this or they come on the weekend for the Advent Market, or they came when it’s dark and then came back during the day to look at the nutcrackers better in the daylight,” he said.

“I think Judy and I were so pleased and humbled to see families down here. To get families, grandmas, grandchildren, children, to come downtown and spend a night here or two and you know we never had any issues of negativity at all. It just flowed so well. We were just astounded at the response to it,” Barilla said.

Incredible weather helped with attendance.

“In our planning for this year, another reason to get the hoops up, it would have been very hard to clear snow with all those wires on the ground,” Bratten said. “The Advent Market went very well. Mark (Nelson) went to different people and said we don’t know how this is going to go but if you want to participate, we’ll give you a good introductory rate, and all of the vendors were thrilled. They had a wonderful time, so we’ve expanded it this year — instead of two weekends, it’s four,” she said.

There will be 10 artisan chalets and five offering food.

Attendance was especially amazing, they said, after the Christmas parade that played out during unseasonably warm weather.

“People just flooded down here, and that’s when we realized the draw and the interest. It was just phenomenal,” Barilla said.

“I was just so excited about it,” Bratten recalled how she felt as the Nutcracker Village was visited by the public for the first time.

Light-Up night is planned for 6 p.m. Nov. 22, with live entertainment on Third Street, school bands from Steubenville, Harding and Central; and Brenda Casey dancers dressed as nutcrackers.

And the chance to go see the nutcrackers and Advent Village.

Bratten estimates there were more than 10,000 visitors with the prospect of more this time around.

Another attraction will be a 30-foot donated tree that will be decorated and in the fort fountain.

It all adds up to a unique holiday experience, made extra special, she said by the positivity it fosters and the cooperation demonstrated.

“All the different organizations and businesses and individuals want to help. When we put out an appeal for money for the Christmas lights, we got donations of $5, $1, $25, people called and said I have something you might want to use in your displays, just that cooperation, community pride, positivity, people are so thrilled to have something right in their hometown. They don’t have to drive somewhere, and that’s what I want to get across — the pride and cooperation and the joy of the event and the season,” Bratten said.

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