If you think Christmas is all saccharine sentimentality, check out the ZCMI Christmas candy windows this year. They're funky, fun and off-beat enough to please children of all ages.
This year's theme of "And what to my wondering eyes should appear?" puts the emphasis on "wonder" and the dreamlike magic of the holiday season.Six designers got to let their imaginations take flight in creating some new and whimsical windows.
"This is the fourth year of letting designers pick their own designs and doing different designs in each window. This is much more interesting because it is much more diverse," said Michael Stephens, ZCMI's visual director. "It's like going to an art gallery and having different artists, rather than going from window to window with the same theme."
Take the display created by Mindy Gardner. Hers is titled "Close Encounters of the Christmas Kind" and, among other things, it features a mommy alien holding yuletide items (and her alien baby) in her six hands. Overhead, a space ship is whisking a Christmas tree off to another planet.
The idea "just came to me," Gardner said. "I wanted to do something that little kids would like."
Not far away in the design room of the vast ZCMI warehouse, designer Monte Blunk is busily sticking white gumballs, mints and marshmallows onto a plastic foam snowman coated in silicone glue. Blunk, an avid outdoorsman, said Utah's deserts inspired him to create "Christmas Down Under" -- not Australia, but really down under the earth's surface.
Layers of "sediment" and lots of winding trails come together to make a subterranean ant farm composed of lots of licorice, jelly beans, gummy candies and cinnamon sticks.
As with the other designers, one of Blunk's greatest challenges will be to dismantle the display in sections, move it into the surprisingly small windows that line the front of the department store, and then carefully re-assemble everything.
Any fallen or broken candies must be replaced and any cracks painstakingly repaired. Foam and plywood are common underpinnings because the finished sculptures are so heavy they would topple without something sturdy underneath.
The windows will be unveiled at the downtown ZCMI store on Friday, Nov. 26.
This job has occupational hazards, as designer Celeste Cecchini can attest. "I gained 20 pounds one year. I learned years ago that simple sampling is all you need," she said.
Stephens said the window decor uses about 6,000 pounds of candy. The work begins each February to first conceptualize what the themes should be and how the windows should look. Color renderings come next. Then designers research all kinds of hard candies to find what they'll need. Soft sweets, such as chocolate, don't work because they melt under the hot display lights.
Designer Ann Degiorgio even attended a candy expo in Chicago that produced a bevy of new gourmet candies, including a sweet called Edo that can be manipulated, rolled and cut like Play-Doh, as well as some gourmet gums.
Designer Alysa Revell chose a "Season of Hope" theme and a slightly more traditional format. "I am trying to do something for the new millennium, to show the hope we have for the future," she said, as she smeared All-Bran Cereal onto a dog-shaped sculpture to produce a furry coat for "Y2-Canine."
The designers said they hope the St. Louis-based May Department Stores Co., which bought the ZCMI department store chain in October, will continue the holiday windows after this year. ZCMI will become part of Meier & Frank, a Portland-based division of the May Co.
Cheryl Hansen, spokeswoman for Meier & Frank Co., said, "Window and tree traditions are celebrated at many of our stores, and we look forward to continuing those traditions at ZCMI."