In a perfect world, the magic that is the winter holiday season would be allowed to begin softly and build towards a warm and joyous
conclusion, but in this day and age, it far more often starts with trumpets blasting, sometimes even before Halloween has had a chance to become a memory! One of my favorite heralds of the season is the unveiling of the holiday windows in the big department stores Thanksgiving week, then it is o.k. to start
humming a festive tune, and maybe even buy a gift or two.
In the last couple of years, Mican Morgan, the curator of the Thorne Rooms at the Chicago Art Institute has begun to decorate several of those wonderful miniature rooms for the holidays. This year, Jolie Gaston and Annelle Ferguson have
picked up the gauntlet and done the same for several of the Thorne rooms at the Knoxville Museum of Art.
Jolie and Annelle canvassed their friends and fellow collectors for loans of holiday items and organized a holiday decorating day at the museum. They found it fascinating to venture behind the scenes at the Knoxville Museum of Art. If you look closely, you can see how large the rooms actually are behind their frames, and that they slide out as if in drawers, and pivot so that they can be
adjusted. Note also, the white gloves on Jolie’s hands, a necessity when handling artifacts of an historical nature.