For more than 20 years, Helene Honeywell has lovingly restored damaged Nativity sets for churches and families.
Nearly always, the main casualty is the baby Jesus. The lambs run a close second.
“And I’ve done a number of decapitations,” Honeywell says.
Considering that the sets generally remain in storage most of the year, she repairs an impressive accumulation of dings, chips, missing fingers, broken legs, cracked noses, the results of all manner of misadventure.
“A dog ran through a yard last year, and knocked over this Joseph, and broke off his fingers,” she said, looking over a crowd of Nativity figures awaiting her attention.
“This is a church set. All of ’em needed fixing. There were places where the paint didn’t match the original, and dings. I still have the Three Wise Men to do. You can see how their noses are dinged up. You can see where someone tried to match the paint and didn’t quite succeed.”
Honeywell uses a painter’s palette, an oval with dainty dabs of color she mixes until she achieves the precise color she wants. Being exacting about detail is what got her into this vocation and avocation.
Years ago, when she was a young mother, something about the faces in her Nativity set bothered her. Mary’s eyes weren’t centered, and her lips were off-kilter.
“It bothered me for a while, and then I got the courage to do something about it,” she says.
“I remember the Blessed Virgin’s mouth was cockeyed, and it made her look like she was smirking.”
She gathered her gumption, got out a paintbrush, and painted a fondly maternal smile on Mary’s face. Then someone asked her to fix a Sacred Heart statue at her church, and things escalated from there.
The staff at Gerken’s Religious Supplies, a Denver-based store that serves hundreds of churches, eventually heard about Honeywell. In 1992, the store put her on a retainer to fix statuary, Nativity sets and other religious figures.
“You know, when you’re praying, you have the statue to put you in mind of your heavenly mother — it’s not praying to the image itself,” she says.
“You shouldn’t be distracted by thinking about how to fix her face instead of focusing on your prayer.”
Claire Martin: 303-954-1477 or cmartin@denverpost.com
