You get a hint of Judi Gable’s obsession before you even walk through her front door.
Maybe it’s the lights illuminating the grinning bunny figures that peer from her living room window. Or the cart brimming with colorful Easter eggs near the front walk. Or the neat rows of plastic eggs edging her landscaping beds.
But those are nothing compared to what’s inside.
Gable’s house is an Easter extravaganza, a candy-colored holiday wonderland. Just about every surface of her snug ranch house in Ellet is covered with symbols of the season, mostly in miniature form.
Itty-bitty bunnies in band uniforms march in an Easter parade across her antique Victrola. Clusters of tiny rabbit and chick figurines fill a shadow box in her kitchen. A stuffed bunny rests with its duck friend on a bench in the hall.
There are golfing bunnies, fishing bunnies, bunnies in school, bunnies getting married, bunnies selling vegetables — just about any human activity you can think of, rendered in rabbit form.
It is, she admits, a little excessive. But to her, it’s pure fun.
Gable said her passion for Easter decorations goes back to when her grown children were little. She always made a big deal of dyeing eggs with them, she said, and eventually she graduated to embellishing Styrofoam and plastic eggs. While her husband, Dan, worked the midnight shift, she’d fill her time after the kids went to bed fashioning elaborate creations — crocheted eggs stiffened with sugar starch, hinged eggs that opened to reveal miniature surprises, decorative eggs studded with beads or decoupaged with floral paper napkins.
A decade or so ago, she started arranging little bunny figurines and other Easter decorations into village scenes. People gave her more, and the collection grew.
Most of the items on display were purchased, but many are her own handiwork. One of her latest additions is a larger-than-life rabbit fashioned from stiff wire and a tomato cage, which holds court in a corner of her living room with a cluster of stuffed animals.
She’s always loved creating, she said. When her daughter was little, she’d crochet an outfit for the girl’s Barbie doll every night and leave it on her night stand to find in the morning.
She has also long enjoyed decorating for holidays, probably because when she was growing up, her parents weren’t interested. If she didn’t do it, she said, nobody would.
In fact, Gable decorates for every holiday. She’s been known to trim six Christmas trees. This year she had to take down her St. Patrick’s Day stuff before the day even arrived, just to make way for the Easter adornments.
“Crazy, crazy, crazy,” she said. “But I love it.”
So do her friends and neighbors. The neighborhood kids, especially, like to come by to see what she’s put up, she said.
Gable’s Easter decorations alone fill eight plastic tubs, and putting them all out is a time-consuming undertaking that’s complicated by sciatic nerve trouble. She wasn’t sure she’d manage it this year after undergoing surgery in late February, but “I made up my mind I’m gonna do it,” she said.
So she did.
And now all is right with the Gables’ Easter celebration.
Mary Beth Breckenridge can be reached at 330-996-3756 or mbrecken@thebeaconjournal.com. You can also become a fan on Facebook at www.facebook.com/MBBreckABJ, follow her on Twitter @MBBreckABJ and read her blog at www.ohio.com/blogs/mary-beth.