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Northwest Living Valerie Easton

A Holiday Gathering

Old treasures travel to a new home and make the season bright

It took moving from a 4,200-square-foot house on Bainbridge Island to a 1,500-square-foot condominium on Seattle's First Hill for Charlotte Irving to face up to the fact that she's a collector.

The urge to accumulate was bred in the bone by a father who collected everything. Irving confines herself to amassing dishes and ornaments. She still has a number of her father's glass pieces, including the pedestal bowl that holds her very first little red Santa.

Before she could move, Irving was forced to cull the Christmas ornaments and trappings she'd collected over the years. It took her two years, and in the process, she says, "I had to get rid of a lot of old friends."

You'd never know it, though, to look around the decked-out condo. Hundreds of lively faces — some pensive, most jolly, many bearded — animate its serenely sophisticated interiors. Windowsills, tables, dressers and kitchen countertops hold a festival of gnomes, angels, bears, frogs and choirboys, but mostly Irving's beloved Santas. "Each has its own personality," Irving says, from the slender, caped European Father Christmases to glittery fat Santas with big, round belly bowls holding red and green M&Ms.

"I have a little touch of Christmas in every room," Irving says with understatement. A forest of tiny chartreuse Monterey cypress trees, pointing up out of shiny red pots, greets visitors at the door. These are the only living greens in the scheme; the spicy smell of pine and spruce are courtesy of scented candles. The chest in the entry is decked out in old wooden ornaments, and a Santa in a sleigh dashes through the snow in the den. "The older European Santas are less caricatures," Irving points out. Her Irish Santas are made of papier-mâché, and the chubby cookie-jar Santas in the kitchen evoke Christmas past. You can almost smell butter cookies baking when you see their curly, white beards and wide, black belts barely buckling over their cookie-laden tummies.

Despite all the Christmas jollity, Irving wistfully recalls the 1,000 Santas she used to have. "I decorated every room in the Bainbridge house," she says. The downsizing hurt, she admits. "It was hard to discard the memories."

Luckily, the condo has plenty of windowsills, every inch of which are covered in Santas from various traditions. How can all the Santas turn their backs on a view that stretches from downtown Seattle to Lake Sammamish? As the lights come on in the evening, the city outside sparkles nearly as brightly as all the ornaments inside.

How long does it take to produce this Christmas stage set? "About four days," says Irving. "But I'm not really done — I'm still tweaking."

Irving, a painter and former interior designer, didn't move into the condo until she'd had a chance to transform it. When she and her husband, Jack, bought the 20-year-old place, the first thing they did was remodel the kitchen. The blue and white color scheme wasn't what they had in mind. "I could see past it," says Irving. They opened up the kitchen, adding storage for all her dishes. They stained the maple floors a deep ebony, painted the walls a neutral taupe and built bookcases. Now the modern, monochromatic interior showcases Irving's colorful paintings, except during the month it serves as backdrop for all the greens, whites and reds of her Christmas collections.

Even in this Christmas wonderland of a condo, the decorated tree is a stunner of tiny white lights and glass ornaments. "You can't help but look really closely at each; everyone has their favorites," says Irving, pointing out a leprechaun, dancing bear and a capering clown. "I used to be into clowns," she says with a sigh. She brightens as she points out a new acquisition; Santa in a bright red pickup truck like the one she used to drive when she lived on Bainbridge.

So how many Santas can you squeeze into an urban high-rise condo? "Well, I still have about 50," Irving admits. "If you don't count the Santas on the tree."

Valerie Easton is a Seattle freelance writer and author of "A Pattern Garden." Her e-mail address is valeaston@comcast.net. Mike Siegel is a Seattle Times staff photographer.

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