Quechee
It’s got a sad backstory.
Built in 1873 as a monument to support and love, the building has suffered in recent decades from creeping mold and a leaky roof, becoming instead a symbol of scarcity and neglect.
All the while, the aging congregation of Quechee Community Church slowly came to terms with the fact that members could no longer muster the resources to keep it heated, let alone repaired.
Over the last few years, church leaders, including its youngest member, 50-year-old Lannie Collins, sought help from many sources, including the deep-pocketed institutions of the affluent village, but their pleas went largely unheard.
Last January, they reluctantly shuttered the church. The congregants would worship in their homes, like the last dwindling embers removed from a dimming fireplace.
The building was sold, and the Quechee Community Church’s cash was distributed to area charities that parishioners felt would best carry on the mission of helping those in need.
The loss raised serious questions about the vibrancy of community, and the ability of the church to survive a national trend in declining membership.
Now, on Christmas morning, the building’s windows are dark, with not a creature stirring.
In one small tree beside an entrance ramp, a bird’s nest made of interwoven twigs sits in a crook of the lower branches.
But all it holds is ice.
6:45 a.m.
Less than three miles from the church, Jonah Phillips, 23, is working in the antiseptic glow of the Mobil convenience store on Route 4. Beneath a wayward beard, he wears a company-issued green polo shirt that exposes the tattoos on his forearms.
On his right, the words “rise above” remind him that he can overcome life’s struggles.
These days, those struggles are mostly financial, and that’s why he volunteered to put in not one, but two Christmas day shifts. The first one, which began around midnight, will end as soon as his manager walks in the door to relieve him. The second will run from 4 p.m. until midnight.
“Christmas is a little bit less exciting than it used to be when I was a kid,” Phillips says.
Of the day’s few early morning customers, “a couple of them didn’t even realize it was Christmas until I said ‘Merry Christmas’ to them.”
This isn’t the first Christmas that Philips has worked. Last year, it was Home Depot.
Before that, he worked a sheet-rocking job on Christmas Day to make sure it was done on time. He made more money at that work, but he left it anyway.
“Nobody in sheet-rocking loves their job,” he says.
Phillips’ dream is to move to Portland, Maine, with his girlfriend. She could get a job in child care, while he could pursue a career related to his guitar skills — he plays, but he can repair them, too, a skill he learned from his father, a drummer who loves the blues and classic rock.
Phillips’ left forearm is tattooed with a picture of Jack Skellington, a gothic, grinning skull-headed character from the 1993 animated movie The Nightmare Before Christmas.
“I’ve probably watched it 1,000 times with my Dad,” he says.
When it comes to musical tastes, Phillips has rebelled; his passion is for heavy metal. His girlfriend is not a fan.
“Oh, she hates it,” he says.
Meanwhile, he is wary of her passion, baking. He says it’s a threat to his health.
“She feeds me cookies all the time,” he says. “It’ terrible.”
But at Christmastime, he says, they set aside their differences. He got her a kitchen mixer, and was delighted to unwrap her present — picks and strings and other guitar accessories.
“She’s great,” he says.
7 a.m.
At the Shire, a hotel on Route 4 in neighboring Woodstock, Paul Samataro is already pushing a manual salt spreader that scatters chunks of ice-melt across a slick parking lot.
Samataro, the hotel’s general manager, likes his work. He’s good at it, with a reassuring cheer and a smooth voice like warm maple syrup. He’s chipped his way up through a set of prestigious hospitality jobs, including for The Hermitage Club in Wilmington, Vt.
He lives at the Shire, which means he has no commute, but also blurs the boundaries between his work hours and time with his family, especially on Christmas, when the hotel is fully booked.
This season’s maximum occupancy is welcome news for the Shire, which Samataro says was flagging as a family-owned business two and a half years ago, when it was purchased by Samataro’s employer, Saltaire Properties.
“They’re put a lot of money into this place,” he says. “They really turned it around.”
Over the years, while Samataro has been building a career and tending to the needs of his guests, his wife, Deb, has taken the reins of managing the details of his family’s Christmas plans.
When his 24-year-old son arrives with his high school sweetheart turned fiancee, a gift exchange is planned. Samataro admits sheepishly that he can’t quite remember what he’s giving them.
However, he does share one detail in which his professional and personal life have, happily, converged. He told his son to bring their dog along for the visit.
“This,” he says, smiling, “is a dog-friendly hotel.”
7:30 a.m.
The sun has risen, briefly turning the sky into a rolling feast of rich, pink cotton candy and reminding the region that, after months of decreasing amounts of daylight, a celestial corner has been turned. Slowly, the days will are beginning to lengthen.
Though the sun is just up, Rhonda Bruce, 67, is already shoveling a driveway on Cox District Road, where overnight, the warm weather caused a patch of snow to loosen its grip on the sloped garage roof and fall to the driveway.
Shoveling reminds Bruce of her father.
“He made the neatest snow banks you ever saw,” she says, a Christmas tree pin from a rummage sale adorning her overcoat.
Her father, a machinist and a carpenter, took pride in those banks. She describes the way he would toss the snow into the air and pack it with the shovel in mid-flight, an act of dexterity and nattiness that would leave her watching in admiration.
“That’s how he ruined his shoulders,” she says.
When he graduated to a snow-blower, he would allow her to follow behind with the shovel, cleaning up the ragged line between passes.
Bruce’s father was also a big part of her childhood Christmases, bouncing her and her siblings on his knees, and inventing games that made them laugh. Stockings might hold a plastic Donald the Duck wallet, or a book with a built-in music box that played Pop Goes the Weasel when she cranked it, and oranges and candy canes and yo-yos.
When they made gingerbread men, a few would be hung as ornaments on the family tree. But over time, as Christmas approached, a leg might go missing. Then an arm.
“Before you knew it, you would just have the head dangling there,” she says. She suspects her siblings as the culprits, though she doesn’t know for sure.
She can’t ask her father.
He’s been dead for three years now, and Bruce, who lives next door and works as a dental hygienist, has taken on the shoveling duties herself. It’s one of many ways in which she aids her mother and brother, who has Downs Syndrome and cannot fully care for himself.
Bruce says she doesn’t mind the shoveling. It helps her to burn calories.
But a moment before setting off at a fast trot toward her own home next door, she casts a critical eye at her snowbanks, and the crumbs of snow she’s shuttled onto the public blacktop.
“He wouldn’t want me putting this snow in the road,” she says. “He’d be after me.”
8 a.m.
In a few hours, Joyce and Nelson Gilman expect about a dozen family members will be jockeying for parking outside their trailer in the Riverside Mobile Home Park.
Nelson, 73, is still in his robe, and Joyce, 79, is wearing a nightgown, but the turkey is in the oven, and a plastic tub of cookies is sitting on an end table.
“Nobody has ever not liked my food,” says Joyce, though she does have to navigate a stubborn aversion to vegetables among some of her kids. One son hates carrots; the other, peas.
“They never grew out of the fussy business,” says Nelson.
Their eight children were all from previous marriages, but Joyce says there’s no talk of “stepsons,” or “stepdaughters.”
“They’re all our children,” she says.
That’s part of the secret behind the way the two have proven that second (and in Joyce’s case, third) marriages can stick; they now sit atop a pyramid of family that, after 45 years, includes 14 grandchildren and 16 great-grand children,
The other part of the secret, they agree, is patience.
“He’s more patient than me,” Joyce admits.
Nelson, who worked as an auto mechanic before he went into heating systems, is giving two of his sons the same present this year: 20-inch slip joint pliers.
It’s a tool he could never afford for himself, when the family lived in their first home in White River Junction
“I would have given my right arm for a set,” he said. “I worked with a guy who had some. He would use them for everything. I mean, everything!”
The Gilman’s undiluted cheer is all the more impressive given the obstacles the family has faced.
In 2001, their daughter Karen, who used to call or visit reliably every week, died of ovarian cancer. Not long after, Nelson suffered a stroke and had to give up working. Joyce was diagnosed with Parkinson’s a year or two ago. It’s affecting her memory, and her mobility.
“The older I get, the less I can do,” she said. “Now it’s paper plates.”
There’s been more tragedy in 2016. Their son Mike, who Joyce described as “the happiest kid,” died of bone cancer. Just weeks ago, their daughter Wanda, a military veteran, died of what the doctors called “unattended seizures.”
“We try to remember the fun things. The things they liked to do,” Joyce says.
She reaches to the countertop and pulls out two small figurines, each one a cute, cartoonish elephant striking a playful pose.
“She loved elephants,” Joyce says, of Wanda. “All kinds.”
“I don’t know how to say it,” Nelson says. “She’ll be here, you know.”
9 a.m.
In the parking lot of Mac’s Woodstock Market, Jacob Lapan, 25, and Jason Lapan, 23, are just walking out, carrying a big bouquet of flowers to their pickup.
The brothers have exchanged presents already. Jacob’s new green Celtics shirt is covered up by his new green Packers sweatshirt, while Jason holds up a new set of headphones.
“Now he won’t have to borrow mine,” says Jacob.
Inside the market, their mother, Dorie Lapan, says the family doesn’t feel limited to traditional Christmas turkeys.
“Last night, it was prime rib,” she says.
There are only a handful of customers in the market, including Stephen and Michelle Strauss, of New Jersey, who are celebrating Hanukkah with their 10-year-old son, Ben.
On a hunt for breakfast before tackling the ski slopes at Suicide Six, they find Mac’s has the advantage of being one of the only stores open.
They order a few hot sandwiches from the deli.
“We’ll be eating our Christmas breakfast sitting on the corner of the bed in our hotel room,” says Stephen.
9:30 a.m.
Officer Jim Otranto sits in his squad car by the side of Route 4, watching the stretch right before the busy roadway banks right into the town’s commercial district.
As many people in the community can attest, it’s the site of countless speeding tickets.
“The work (on Christmas) is no different from any other day,” says Otranto.
But that turns out not to be quite true.
“I might be a little more lenient,” he admits, a moment later.
And for those unfortunate few who are ticketed — the “serious violators” — Otranto plans to slip on a Christmas hat and soften the speeding tickets with a bit of Christmas fun. When handing out the violations, he’ll also give motorists one of a pile of scratch off tickets that he bought this morning for the purpose.
Otranto came on at 6 a.m., and he’ll go home around 2, when his daughter will arrive from Connecticut with her two children. Once there, he’s prepared to indulge in a bit of granchild-spoiling.
“My house looks like Toys R Us right now,” he says.
10 a.m.
Back in Quechee, the sun is now revealing signs, small and large, that the church, nearly a year after closing its doors, is stirring back to life.
One is a literal sign, erected on the front lawn on Christmas eve, proudly identifying the new Quechee Church with three words: Grace. Truth. Community.
The parking lot, which was empty a few hours ago, is now overflowing with cars.
Inside, children are laughing, and congregants are passing each other, met with smile after smile. The once-empty pews are now filled with about 100 congregants listening as Pastor Don Willeman explains what has happened.
“I’m actually the pastor of Christ Redeemer Church in Hanover, and I would like to welcome you to the Quechee Church here. You may know something of its story,” he says. “Back in June, we acquired this facility from the former Quechee Community Church. … (We were) humbled by the opportunity to take on this project to try to revitalize this church. Our goal is to eventually nurture a separate, self-sustaining bible congregation back to life, which we’re very excited about.”
As the first steps in that effort, the church has reopened for its first services in months. The next will be on New Years Day; followed by Good Friday and Easter.
“We will be starting weekly worships here as well, starting hopefully in 2017,” Willeman says.
Lannie Collins, the leader of the former Quechee Community Church, is handing out pamphlets and exchanging enthusiastic greetings and hugs with those who walk in the door.
“It’s awesome to see the birth of a new church here in our old church,” he says, explaining that he built and installed the new sign out front.
Working to bring the church back to life has also had benefits for the Christ Redeemer members, says Alyssa Crane, of Lebanon, who is sitting in a rear room with her 11 year-old-daughter Abigail seated by her side.
They’re watching over an infant girl busily pulling on a brightly colored toy xylophone.
Crane, whose husband is Upper Valley Nighthawks owner Noah Crane, says Christ Redeemer holds its own regular services in Hanover High School, while worshiping here brings its own special sense of tradition.
“You’re in a pew,” she says. “You hear the organ.”
In the nave, Willeman has completed his opening remarks and moved on to the opening prayer.
“We know that this holiday season is a hard time for many,” he says. “As perhaps people are remembering losses, remembering those that aren’t with us anymore, we pray a special comfort and blessing upon them at this time. And Father, we pray for this world …”
Matt Hongoltz-Hetling can be reached at mhonghet@vnews.com or 603-727-3211.