A Collect Call at Christmas

With Santas and snowmen and angels galore, a farmhouse turns kingdom for the season

THE WEATHER outside is — oh, you know — chilly, dark and really, really wet.

But not inside Jackie Paulson-Wartman's home. Inside her gray-shake farmhouse outside Poulsbo it's downright cheerful; a spiced-up holiday grog of quaint, cute, vintage and clever.

The wreath on the front door is like a holiday bull's-eye.

"It's a happy house," she says, surveying her personal Christmas kingdom. And she's got hundreds of loyal subjects to prove it.

A white hutch in the dining room is charmingly overpopulated with more than 50 snowpeople. A table just inside the door is a little city of angels. Another table, this one in a far corner of the living room, is a miniature pine-tree forest of 16 little trees; 26 in frost and aluminum stand on a side table in the dining room. And don't miss the Santas. There are three tiers of them half a hundred strong in wax and wood, plastic and pewter, glass and ceramic, on trays and cards, in photos and lights.

But wait, there's more.

The house is festooned with festivity everywhere you look. That includes the regular-type Christmas tree with a Whoville-like tilt at the top. It's loaded with handed-down family ornaments, bouncing colored lights merrily off rosy-pink living-room walls. There is no other choice — you would even have to say it glows.

Paulson-Wartman is a collector, a holiday hunter-gatherer. She holds a degree in art that she takes out on her house.

Her garage is stacked and packed with bins. Her 2,300-square-foot house is her museum. "I thought I was done decorating, and my husband said, 'There's one more bin.' I asked him, 'Is it green? Oh. It's a Christmas. I'm not done.'

"I've always collected. But not like now. Things have gotten a little bit out of hand. The day after I was done decorating I said, 'I'm not bringing another thing into this house,' but I just can't leave something behind."

Her real passion is chicks (not chickens, chicks; little peeps). She figures she's got about 500 of those. Then there are the flower pots. She loves pots. Loves them. More than 70 creamy-white ones and the minty-green ones come out to hold an overflow of shiny ornaments during the holidays, like colorful bubbles about to float from a pipe. They are but a fraction of her collection of 400 or so. There's also a cherry collection, on hiatus while the snowpeople reign.

Paulson-Wartman lives here with her husband, Jack, and two sons, Jared, 15, and Jasper, 11. They are her Christmas accomplices.

"They're used to me," Paulson-Wartman says. "The boys go garage-saling with me almost every weekend. I trained them well."

This is definitely "do try this at home" territory. Paulson-Wartman hits the trail for treasures all year long. Lots of her purchases cost a quarter, and some were free. One of the snowmen, a cookie jar, was kind of pricey at $30, but it had a chip in it, so the cost had been reduced.

Gardening consumes Paulson-Wartman most of the year, so Christmas is her off-season passion.

"When I see something great I think, "Oh goodie!' Then I say, 'No more.' And then I find something else . . ."

One of the more recent something-elses is vintage tablecloths. "I need more, but I haven't seen a good one in a couple of years," Paulson-Wartman says. She already has enough to drape over coffee tables, side tables, carts, armoires and the dining room table, sometimes two and three thick.

But the focus is always on giving the old a new look and a new home; junk to funk. "I'm a tightwad, so I don't spend hardly any money on anything," Paulson-Wartman says.

She's thinking ahead, though, planning to leave the cream pots, bubbling with pink and red ornaments, out for Valentine's Day.

And after that, it'll be Easter and The Return of The Chicks. Then summer looms, and the garden beckons.

Rebecca Teagarden is assistant editor of Pacific Northwest magazine. Barry Wong is a freelance photographer.