Retired Scott City couple goes all out for Christmas

When it comes to decorating for the Christmas season, few people go all out the way Alvie and Gladys Baker do.

Each year before Thanksgiving, the retired Scott City couple breaks out thousands of decorative Christmas pieces and fill every room of their home, even the bathroom, with holiday cheer. The process takes them six weeks to complete.

Some might call this kind of behavior pathological, but not Gladys.

"I just like doing it. I like sharing this with people," she said. "We usually have guests in at Christmas, so we like to have the home looking nice."

Every year the Bakers add a little more to their collection of Christmas-style bears, angels, trees and villages. About 75 percent of the items are gifts. Like a snowball, the gifts just kept coming in -- the more Gladys collected, the more items people bought for her.

The collection includes several ceramics pieces of intricate detail -- a church with stained-glass windows, bears, cherubs -- made by Gladys herself, using her own kiln.

On the outside of the house, three blow-up bears, one popping out of a red and green Christmas present, give a hint of the treasures inside. The centerpiece of the collection is bears. Gladys labels herself a "bear freak," and her family and friends know it, buying her bears at any opportunity.

She's also proud of her Precious Moments pieces -- people and villages -- of which she owns more than a thousand. And Gladys said she keeps the Christ in Christmas, with numerous Nativity scenes and a handmade ceramic bust of Christ on the cross.

Alvie also puts his own touch on the decorations, with car ornaments hanging from one of the homes' several Christmas trees. In his wife's holiday fervor Alvie has been a faithful partner, assisting her for the 15 years the decorations have gone up.

"I just go along with the flow," Alvie said.

Seeing the decorations have become a traditions for the Bakers' children and grandchildrens, but also for their neighbors.

For Shirley Young, walking across the street to see the decorations is a holiday highlight.

"We laugh because often we have people visit us over the holidays, and that's part of the entertainment -- 'Let's go across the street and see our neighbors' display,'" Young said.

msanders@semissourian.com

335-6611, extension 182