The Building That Held Her Workshop For 31 Years Has Been Sold. The Wire Christmas Trees Nell Finished This Year Are the Last She'll Ever Make.

Nell Brauer has a little over four thousand wire trees behind her and until this summer no plans to stop. Her lease is up at the end of January. She is keeping the bench — what ends with the building is the business.

The first thing Nell Brauer will tell you is that she is not competing with your Christmas tree.

"People get that wrong," she says. "They think I'm trying to sell them a substitute. I'm not. Put up your big tree. Put up the one with your mother's ornaments on it. That's the living room, that's an evening, that's the whole thing." She stops to work a length of gold wire around a form. "But that's one room. You've got seven more. And they're all dark."

She learned it from the outside in

Nell was barely out of her twenties when she took a job dressing the Christmas windows at a department store in Dubuque. It was, she says, the best education in light she could have asked for — and nobody thought of it as art at the time. It was a job. You bent the armature, you ran the lights, you hung the glass, and then you went out onto the sidewalk in the cold to look at it, because the sidewalk was the only opinion that counted.

That is where she learned the two things her trees are built on. The first is how a faceted drop actually behaves — that it does nothing at all under a ceiling light, and comes alive when a small warm light sits inside the arrangement with it. The second is what a thing looks like through glass, at night, from fifteen feet away.

In the mid-nineties she left to make her own work, and she rented a room to do it in: the back half of an upstairs floor above a hardware store, two blocks off Main. Bad stairs, one radiator that knocked, and a tall window facing the street. Thirty-one Decembers out of that room — a table at the Galena holiday market, one shelf in a general store on Main Street, and for the last few years a box of them going out in the mail to people who found her. A little over four thousand trees, every one bent by hand at the same bench under that window.

Then, in August, the building sold

The new owners are turning the upper floors into apartments. Nell thinks this is probably the right thing for the building and says so without any bitterness at all; the stairs really are bad, and the radiator really does knock. Her lease runs to the thirty-first of January. After that the keys go back.

Everyone she knows has told her to find another room.

"I know. There's space over on Franklin, there's the back of the old creamery, there's a fellow who'd let me have half his garage." She counts them off and then stops. "I'm sixty-nine. I could spend next year looking at rooms and hauling that bench up somebody else's stairs, and then be seventy and still doing October. Or I could take the hint."

She took the hint. This is the last batch she will make for sale.

She wants that put plainly, because she has already had one person get weepy about it on the phone and she did not care for it. "My hands are sixty-nine years old and they are fine," she says. "They'll bend wire for another twenty years. Nothing's wrong with me and nobody's put me out. A building changed hands, which buildings do, and I looked at what was on the other side of it and decided I'd rather have my Octobers back."

Eighteen drops per tree, hung one at a time. Multiply that by a batch and you have, in her words, piecework — and piecework is what ends with the room, not the craft. The bench is coming home to the spare bedroom. The forms are coming with it. She'll go on making them for her sister, her grandchildren, the woman who has run the store on Main Street since 1998, and anyone else she feels like, at whatever pace she likes, in a year that has no October in it.

"I'll still be bending wire in February with the radio on," she says. "I just won't be counting them into boxes."

420 trees left — everything on the shelves of a room she hands back on 31 January. There is no next batch.

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What she actually does to one

Nell is precise about this, and she'd rather tell you herself than have it written up prettier than it is.

She buys the wire. She buys the acrylic drops, the micro-LED strand, and the base. What she does is everything after that: the gold wire is bent by hand into its spiral, turn by turn, around a form she's been using since before she left the department store. The light strand is wound along the inside of that spiral so the bulbs sit behind the drops rather than in front of them — that's the part that matters, and it's the part she says most people get backwards. Then eighteen faceted acrylic drops go on, one at a time, hung by hand so no two sit at the same height on the same turn. The star goes on last.

It runs on three AA batteries in the base. Nell is unapologetic about that, and it is not a compromise — it is the whole design brief.

"I spent years hiding extension cords under fake snow," she says. "Every window I ever dressed, the outlet was in the wrong place. Your house is the same. The sill you actually want this on, the hall table, the top of the bookcase, the little shelf in the guest room where the grandkids sleep for two nights — there is no outlet there. There never is. So I took the cord out of the problem."

Which means it also travels. Carry it to the dinner table, carry it back to the window afterward. Hand it to someone to hold.

The light in the window

Ask Nell why she makes these specifically and she goes back to the sidewalk in Dubuque.

"There's an old habit of putting a light in the front window in December. My grandmother did it, everybody's grandmother did it. It isn't for the people in the house. It's for whoever is out walking in the dark, so they know somebody's home in there." She shrugs. "I spent eight winters making that feeling for a department store. Then I figured I'd make it small enough that anyone could have one."

She has done it herself every year since, in the tall window of the rented room — one tree lit, left on, facing the street two blocks off Main. She says people have knocked on the downstairs door in December to ask what it was. That is how a fair number of her customers found her in the first place.

That window goes dark at the end of January.

Her customers, she says, almost never buy just one. They buy one, put it somewhere, and come back the following December for the hallway, the kitchen sill, the bedroom, the room with the good chair in it.

From people who already have one

The details

• Height: 12.4 in (31.5 cm)
• Width: 5.7 in (14.5 cm) at the widest turn; the base is narrower
• Drops: 18 faceted acrylic drops, hung individually, plus the star at the top
• Light: warm white micro-LEDs wound inside the spiral
• Power: 3 x AA batteries in the base, push switch — no cord, no outlet
• Made: wire bent, light wound, drops and star hung by hand in Galena, Illinois

This page is a paid advertisement presented by Marlow Market Co. and is not independent editorial content. Customer comments reflect individual experiences. Stock figures are accurate as of publication and change as orders are placed. Drops are faceted acrylic, not glass. Batteries are not included.