Home(s) for the holidays: Previewing library tour

By FINN HARTNETT

Staff writer

The Marion Public Library’s 2024 Home Tour, “A Nutcracker Christmas,” will be 1 to 4 pm Sunday.

Tickets are available at the library and cost $5.

Refreshments and a model train display will be at the library on the day of the tour.

“We have four beautiful homes,” librarian Janet Marler said. “They’re always different. We’re fortunate that homeowners agree to do this for us.”

Roughly 250 people show up to the event each year, according to Marler.

The Record spoke to the four homeowners featured this year to get a sense of what to expect.

Tracey Long, 424 Elm St.

A bungalow built in the ’50, Tracey Long’s house is as much a home for her as it is for hundreds of children.

For 36 years, Long has run a day care center called Home Away From Home.

“I’m watching kids now that are kids of my original group,” she said. “It’s a real family-like environment.”

Long takes kids from birth until kindergarten. Some older kids also drop in after school.

“So long as they want to keep coming, they keep coming,” she said.

The kids have helped decorate her home this year.

They have ornamented a tree in the “learning room,” where they eat and do activities.

“I try to transform the house from its normal everyday look to feeling pretty and special,” Long said.

She highlighted the red oak floors — restored from the original — as well as various nativity scenes given to her by friends and family.

“I’m kind of a weird decorator because I just go with whatever feels right,” Long said. “But I’m excited to show the floors and the originality of the house and my nativities.”

Long called the nativities her favorite decorations and said faith played a role in her style.

“I’m very much a believer,” Long said. “I want to make sure that the people that come in, and especially the day care kids as they’re growing up, that they understand why we have Christmas.”

Marler asked Long to be on the home tour for a few years, but she was unable to until this year because of conflicts.

“I think it’s an honor to be asked,” she said.

Perhaps the most unique feature of her house is a wall of glass bricks between the living room and the kitchen.

“It’s really different,” Long said. “You wouldn’t call it antique, but it’s original.”

The kids at daycare love the wall, and use it as a kind of jumbo kaleidoscope, Long said

“When you get really close and look through it, it reflects 100 images of what you’re seeing on the other side of the wall,” she said.

Bryan and Angela Hess, 608 S. Lincoln St.

When Angela Hess thinks of Christmas decorations, she thinks of her mother.

“Growing up, my mom, she decorated, she took stuff off the walls, and every inch of our house was decorated in decor,” she said. “I got that love of decorating from her, and I’ve always done that to my home. There isn’t one room that isn’t decorated.”

Hess grew up in Herington, where, she said, “the Christmas home tour was about the Christmas decorations.”

“It wasn’t so much about the house. It was seeing the décor,” she said.

Hess emphasized the expansiveness of her and her husband’s decorations, and downplayed the extent to which the house around the decor mattered.

When asked how her home influenced her decorations, Hess balked.

“It’s a basic ranch-style home,” she said. “There’s nothing real exciting about it. But if there’s an entry or in the kitchen… I try to accentuate corners and ledges. Everything’s decorated with garlands or trees or something that’s Christmas.”

Like Long, Hess was asked for a few years to feature her home before agreeing this year.

“I always go all out,” she said. “And I guess it would be nice to let everyone else kind of enjoy what I enjoy.”

Her living room features a Christmas tree covered in wine-and-gold ribbons and ornaments, as well as a nativity scene.

“For me, that’s what Christmas is about,” she said. “It’s about the celebration of Jesus’s birth. That’s the main reason why I decorate, just to show my love for him and my love for my family.”

J.D. Bauman and Phoebe Janzen, 673 Walnut St.

“I don’t get real excited about Christmas decorating,” J.D. Bauman said.

Nevertheless, he and his wife, Phoebe Janzen, have put in the time to be featured in this year’s Library Home Tour.

A painter, Bauman repainted the house’s exterior after he and his wife purchased it in 2022.

“I’m excited to show off my painting skills a little bit,” he said.

The house dates to the 1920s.

As part of more recent renovations, the couple added a 25-by-25-square-foot sunroom to the back, as well as a carport.

“The pillars that hold the roof have inserts, and I painted them a different color,” Bauman said of the carport. “It’s a black and white house, basically, but I like the way it turned out.”

As for Christmas decorating, Bauman recruited his sister and her husband from St. Louis to help set things up.

He praised his sister’s interior decorating.

“I’d say we probably spent 10 or 12 hours doing everything, all together,” Bauman said. “We downsized and got rid of a lot of stuff. And we bought some new stuff, and we borrowed some stuff. I think it’s all come together pretty nicely,”

The decor includes a 7½-foot-tall tree in the sunroom with red, white, and gold ornaments and white Christmas lights. It is topped with a gold crown.

Bauman highlighted the variety of his home’s decor.

“We’ve got a nativity scene in one room,” he said. “Each room’s got different things in it. There’s some variety. We have a big picture window and some fake snow in it with snowmen dressed up as carolers.”

Bauman is excited about being on the tour and joked that people might want to come in more for renovations than the decor.

“I’ve lived in Marion most of my life,” he said. “I’ve left a couple of times, but always end up back here. I know a lot of the people that’ll be coming through.”

Glen and Pam Hett, 2060 Hwy 77

Glen and Pam Hett’s home blends an old-style farmhouse with a sleek and polished interior.

Their Christmas decorations similarly reflect both the family’s Kansas farming heritage and the years they spent in the Pacific Northwest.

Glen was born and raised on the couple’s property north of Marion.

He went to work on the family farm out of high school and remained there for decades.

When the economy soured in the mid-2000s, Glen took a job at a Boeing factory in Wichita.

In 2007, the factory shuttered.

“It was either no job or get transferred to Seattle,” Pam said.

The family relocated to Everett, 25 miles north of Seattle, the home of another factory.

When Glen retired in 2020, the couple returned to Marion.

They tore down the farmhouse they used to live in and built a new one.

Though Glen in particular is happy to be back in Kansas, the Hetts remember their time in Washington State fondly.

“We brought back a lot of memories with us,” Pam said. “We have three kids, and two of them followed us up there because they just fell in love with it. And they’re still there!”

Decorating for the holidays took “too long,” Pam said.

“When I was younger, I could decorate the place in a couple days, and it’s taken me probably a good week and a half to get everything the way I wanted it.”

Though more traditional decorations, such as a cabinet nativity and a large, baubled Christmas tree, lie in their living room, side rooms feature more unique décor inspired by the Pacific Northwest.

One bedroom features a white Christmas tree full of orca ornaments, reminders of whale-watching expeditions the Hetts frequented in Everett.

“When friends or family would visit, we would take them on whale watching trips,” Pam said. “We always had great luck.”

Various D.I.Y. projects also make the home unique.

“Usually I come up with the ideas, and he works on them,” Pam said.

Recently, Glen turned an old grain bin into a backyard gazebo.

“I knew I wanted one since we moved back, and this grain bin has been on the farm for over 50 years,” Pam said.

A leaded glass door from Glen’s parents’ home now protects the Hett pantry.

A bench in the hallway was once a pew at Youngtown Church. The couple rescued after the church closed in the 1990s.

“We had to cut it down so we could get it to fit in here,” Glen said. “It was a ten-footer.”

Asked what their favorite decoration was, the Hetts picked out not a Christmas decoration, but a tablecloth crocheted by Glen’s grandmother and given to a neighbor, Theodora Koslowsky, half a century ago.

Koslowsky gave the tablecloth back to the Hetts after they returned to Marion.

The Koslowskys must have been a tidy family; the tablecloth is a blinding white, without a stain to be seen.

“My grandmother had rheumatoid arthritis, and she did most of her crocheting in bed,” Glen said. “Somebody would set things up, and she did it right there.”

The Hetts are excited to show off both a recently built home and their eclectic decorations.

“A lot of people have asked us about the house,” Pam said.