Hodgeville shows off its Christmas Spirit

A village in southwestern Saskatchewan showed off its Christmas spirit with its “The Night Jesus was Born” event.

Hodgeville is about an hour southeast of Swift Current. It recently held the event, with residents bringing their collection of nativity scenes to showcase.

The free event had more than 1,100 nativity scenes on display. There were so many that the community ran out of room to display them all.

One of the nativity scenes during Hodgeville’s “The Night Jesus Was Born” event. (Gail Hapanowicz/Submitted)

The event only lasted for three days at the Hodgeville Community Centre, but Hodgeville resident Gail Hapanowicz said the event was a big hit — and not just with the locals.

“Hodgeville is a little tiny village,” she said. “There’s only 174 people here and it’s tiny, so when the community can get together and do something special, I’d like to be a part of that.

“It’s a beautiful thing. People come from all over the province to come and see this. It’s absolutely beautiful, and it’s very peaceful when you’re there.”

Hapanowicz had three different depictions of the nativity scene that she created for the event.

“There are people who have 50 to 70 in there, but I have three,” she said.

One was a music box, one depicted a Polish tradition called an Oplatek and one was a picture down in 3D diamond art.

“It takes 27 hours to do one picture, and so I did a picture of Santa, and he’s kneeling down and looking at the nativity scene through a window, which is both ends of Christmas,” Hapanowicz said of the diamond art.

“I did a special thing with it. I don’t just frame my art. I put it on a canvas, paint the background, and then I added branches from a tree, and then I made a top to make it look like a stable.”

The community’s “The Night Jesus Was Born” event began 13 years ago and has grown in size every year.

Hapanowicz said there’s a lot of work that goes into the weekend-long event.

“There’s a bunch of ladies — about a dozen of them — and they get together and some husbands, and they have displays that are mainly on tables,” she said. ” You walk through and it’s like a maze, and then they have other things that they hang on the walls.

“They’ve made big wooden trees with shelves, and so the displays are put on the shelves. Then they decorate the hallways (and) they decorate the room where people can sit to have a snack, so they spend a good amount of time every day and every night for about a week before.

“Then I think it takes about two or three days to dismantle everything on top of that.”

One of the nativity scenes during Hodgeville’s “The Night Jesus Was Born” event. (Gail Hapanowicz/Submitted)