Many people love their Nativity scenes, but Elsie Kennedy’s handmade, 18-piece collection comes with a possibly miraculous Christmas tale. She called The Columbian last week to tell us all about it, and we paid a visit to her small apartment at The Lofts at Glenwood Place.
Kennedy is the kind of person who decorates her front door monthly, to keep with the season. Inside, she’s hung up some framed Christian artworks and a completed Last Supper jigsaw puzzle.
The Nativity sits on a small table near the window. It’s in pristine and shiny shape, which is pretty amazing given that Kennedy made it and painted it herself over half a century ago. It’s even more amazing when you consider its difficult birth, as Kennedy explained.
In October 1962, she was a young wife and mother, enjoying life on quiet, dead-end Northeast 94th Avenue in Clark County’s Barberton area, and exploring her love of the arts by doing painting and indulging in pottery lessons at a shop in Ridgefield. That’s where she formed that 18-piece Nativity set — entirely with her own hands, she said.
Forming and finishing pottery is a multistage process, and Kennedy’s Nativity was still at the “greenware” stage, meaning shaped out of soft clay but still unfired, and sitting on a shelf in that Ridgefield shop, when history happened. On Oct. 12, the wind picked up to hurricane speeds, buildings throughout the Pacific Northwest were toppled and a few dozen people died in what became known as The Columbus Day Storm — the most significant windstorm ever to hit the Vancouver-Portland area. Wind speed at Pearson Field was clocked at 92 mph.
Kennedy fearfully drove to her mother’s place to pick up her three children and get them home, she said. Her mother warned her not to leave again, but Kennedy insisted. “I was the only car on the freeway, but we made it OK,” she said.
The Columbus Day Storm caused widespread destruction. Kennedy hunkered down with her family. In the morning, she called the pottery studio and heard from the owner that the place was “a sad, terrible mess” and all classes were canceled — but that there had also been a miracle.
Kennedy ventured there and found the floor buried under a layer of smashed and scattered bits and pieces of ceramics. Everything was in ruins — except for one group of 18 items.
“It was on a high shelf. I walked over and there it was. I was amazed, all my things were still there,” said Kennedy. “I was astounded.”
She wrapped up her Nativity scene, took it home and got back to work on it. “I got it prepared for its first firing,” which happened back in Ridgefield when the shop was up and running again.
She’s never been away from it since, she said. She and her three children used to pick up the three kings and retell the story of their journey toward Jesus’ birth, she said, in a family Christmas ritual; two of her sons are now deceased, she said. Her grown daughter is the one who insisted that Kennedy and her husband (who resides in the memory care wing of Glenwood) move back to Clark County. When The Columbian visited, Kennedy was getting ready to spend a day with a granddaughter.
“She was so young,” Kennedy mused about Mary, her favorite figurine from the collection. “Can you imagine how that felt, to know you were pregnant but you’d never been with a man, to know you had an important role to play? She was willing.”
For the past half-century, Kennedy said, she has been sharing the story of “my miracle Nativity set.”
