Vinton Christmas display turning off the lights after 56 years

VINTON — As she manually opens her garage door, Heidi Kersten unveils a family biography she couldn’t completely install this year.

There under fluorescent lights are hundreds of Christmas displays made by hand over the last 56 years, each covered in the dust and grit brought by decades of glowing memories for the Kerstens and every family that drove by.

“Nobody really gets to see this,” Kersten said of the garage that’s not just a storage unit, but an intimate look at her life with its ups and downs, learning curves and celebrations.

There’s the bald eagle her dad dreamed up overnight to celebrate the bicentennial in 1976, whose mechanical wings moved with a cadence that told Heidi everything was working at night.

There’s the display of Winnie-the-Pooh, made by her late brother Kyle, with a scorched arm from catching fire, demonstrating the risk involved with maintaining some of the homemade mechanisms.

A rocket ship with billowing smoke, made in the ‘60s as man landed on the moon, reminds Heidi of the stitches she got after a bracket fell on her head, ensuring blood would be part of the family passion that demanded sweat and tears.

On her lawn this year are a handful of displays she managed to put up. It’s a drastic reduction from the tradition’s previous years, but still the pride and joy of her rural home that has been running longer than she’s been alive.

“I never saw an empty socket until this year,” Kersten said. “It’s kind of killing me, I keep thinking what did I forget to plug in.”

One made in memory of her parents, Larry and Carolyn, is surrounded by the figures of the family the founders cut out. They’re showing their age — the figure representing Heidi is a baby.

Down the line, a chapel reminds Carolyn of one of her mother’s favorite songs — “The Little Brown Church in the Vale.” Next are the first moving mechanical displays made by her father, a big deal when they were made.

The hands on the figure of Jesus are a tracing of her father’s hands, which will be difficult to store away. Yet another shows a woman moving back and forth to play an organ with a Christmas choir — something visitors always thought represented Carolyn.

As Kersten, 52, turns on the displays for the last time this year, the ones she kept in storage are only a taste of what’s to come. After 56 years, this holiday season will be the last for the displays.

“It’s the only Christmas I’ve ever known. I don’t want to see it go,” she said. “They’re getting worn out, and so am I.”

As the physical wear of installing and taking down the displays takes its toll, Kersten hopes to get a little freedom away from the displays. With finicky old handmade mechanisms concocted by her father with socket wrenches, wringer washing machine motors and gear boxes, it’s perhaps ironic that Kersten has never been able to see anyone else’s Christmas displays when she has to monitor her own all winter.

Though Heidi has been involved with the display her whole life, she has been running it herself with the assistance of friends since 1999, when her father died.

A farm boy at heart, Larry worked at Link-Belt in Cedar Rapids making crane parts. He was known to mix every color by hand, and was as artistic as he was mechanically inclined, with a love for both tinkering and drawing. Seeing the reaction to his first displays was all the encouragement he needed to build an empire of displays that would become a Christmas tradition for families all around.

Carolyn, who died in 2002, was the boss of the operations and supervised light bulb changes, maintenance and long installations that cars lined up for miles to see in the ‘80s.

“ (Carolyn) was really particular about where things went,” said Mike Hepker, a family friend who has been helping with the lights since the mid ‘80s. “She’d bring out books and say ‘no, that was over here.’”

But since 2002, the substitute teacher has carried on, remaking displays by hand over and over as some seemed to age beyond repair for a diminishing audience. The more she thought about it, the more she realized why she continued the tradition.

“I’ve lost a lot of people in my family. The lights have never let me down. It’s been the one constant,” she said. “I didn’t want to give up because I knew they're always going to be beautiful at Christmas. Just having that one thing has been what’s kept me going.”

Despite their age and wear, warping and tears, Hepker said the displays have managed to instill a spirit of Christmas as tangible as the 33,000 lights. The Vinton man, now an electrician by trade, said the charm of the handmade life-size displays is something that still comes across, old or new.

“A lot of it was doing it for the young kids,” he said. “You drive by and their eyes light up with the different displays, when they look at Santa coming up and down the chimney. You can see the amazement in their eyes.”

That’s why he kept helping, year after year.

Another helping friend, Angie Becker, said there was nothing like the display when it was in its prime.

“That display was the one we’d come to see after the church Christmas program,” she said. “It’s the only one I remember being that big.”

Now, her daughter goes to see it with her friends.

“Her parents loved Christmas. (Kersten) wanted to provide that joy and memories of Christmas to other families,” Becker said. “I think that’s what kept her going. She wanted to keep her parents’ legacy alive.”

As generations of children made their own memories driving by the displays over 56 years, Kersten made her own from the other side of the fence: recognizing her father dressed up as Santa even when her parents didn’t want her to know, hearing the music play through the window after her early bed times, listening for the mechanical heartbeat of the ensemble.

After the displays are unplugged for the last time on Dec. 27, the memories of 52 years are what will be left to keep her warm under winter’s moonlight.

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