ASMA KHALID, HOST:
A village of giant nutcrackers is reviving Christmas celebrations in Steubenville, Ohio. The small town has faced economic challenges since its last steel mill closed nearly two decades ago. Erin Gottsacker with The Ohio Newsroom has the story.
ERIN GOTTSACKER, BYLINE: Brodie Stutzman stands in his workshop, considering a nearly finished nutcracker. Unlike the traditional mantle-topping toy, this one is almost as tall as he is.
(SOUNDBITE OF SHAKING SPRAY PAINT)
GOTTSACKER: He shakes a bottle of spray paint before applying a regal pattern onto the figure's red coat - attaches the lower jaw onto another.
BRODIE STUTZMAN: Every one of these nutcrackers here has something that I'm doing to it. And I'm kind of just moving around trying to finish things up. So I'm still doing some painting on this one, doing some stenciling with that.
GOTTSACKER: A pair of the figures stand ramrod straight, blank faces tilted upwards, awaiting a brush to paint bright eyes and mustaches onto their rosy cheeks. Two freshly painted black arms dangle from the ceiling to dry. Nearby, another nutcracker balances upside down on a top hat. The giant toy Stutzman creates lines Steubenville's main drag to create a unique walk-through attraction, the Nutcracker Village.
STUTZMAN: It's like an army of toys in the streets downtown.
GOTTSACKER: Stutzman has been making the nutcrackers for the city's display for 10 years. Before that, Steubenville's Christmas celebrations were dramatically smaller.
GRETCHEN NELSON: They had had a Christmas parade that had been poorly attended.
GOTTSACKER: That's Gretchen Nelson, Stutzman's mother-in-law. At the time, she remembers community leaders getting together to brainstorm ways to revive the city's holiday celebrations. Someone suggested decorating storefront windows with nutcrackers. Her husband suggested scaling that idea up.
NELSON: We had a manufacturing company, and we primarily make, like, religious art, but we make a lot of different things. And so - and he is a woodworker. And so Mark was like, What if we made big nutcrackers?
GOTTSACKER: The couple's daughter created designs for the giant toys, and they enlisted their son-in-law, Stutzman, to bring them to life. That first year, he built 37 nutcrackers. The next year, 75. He handcrafts each one from scratch, starting with a 200-pound block of Styrofoam.
STUTZMAN: We cut it into smaller blocks. With this contraption, it's a hot wire cutter, and as you can see, it moves back and forth.
(SOUNDBITE OF LATHE ROTATING)
GOTTSACKER: Then a wood lathe rotates the block like a pottery wheel.
(SOUNDBITE OF LATHE ROTATING)
GOTTSACKER: And as it's spinning, Stutzman uses a blade to give their toy bodies distinct shapes.
STUTZMAN: You then sand it smooth, and then you coat it in fiberglass with a brush. And then when that dries, you sand it, and you can sand it on the lathe as well, and that gets that final complete version before you're ready to paint it.
GOTTSACKER: There are more than 200 on display in downtown Steubenville. Some are traditional soldiers. Others are recognizable characters like Charlie Brown, Mary Poppins and the cast of "The Wizard Of Oz."
STUTZMAN: This one here is Flick from "A Christmas Story" when he sticks his tongue to the flagpole.
GOTTSACKER: The festive Nutcracker Village attracts lots of visitors. Last year, more than five times the city's 18,000 residents showed up. Nelson says that scale of tourism is working wonders to revitalize the city's streets. Her family alone decided to invest in a building that had been mostly empty since 1970.
NELSON: The reason that we opened the coffee shop and the popcorn store and the Christmas store was because we saw the value in what was happening with the nutcrackers. And my husband felt like, all right, we'll just, you know, put our money where our mouth is and invest in the downtown.
GOTTSACKER: Others followed suit.
NELSON: Ever since we started the Nutcracker Village, a pottery studio has opened. A cigar store has opened. Bookstore remained open.
GOTTSACKER: So while Steubenville's giant nutcrackers don't come to life themselves on long December nights, they are breathing new life into the city's downtown.
For NPR, I'm Erin Gottsacker in Steubenville, Ohio.
(SOUNDBITE OF BERLIN SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA'S "THE NUTCRACKER, BALLET, OP. 71: SCENE NO. 2, MARCH") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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