By Deb Peterson • Photos by Deb Peterson • Styling Kelly Householder-Giuliano
If you were lucky enough to tour Marilyn Allen’s home during the Cameo Club Tour of Homes several years ago, you most definitely remember the magnificent Victorian filled with myriad collections, large and small. Every room, and there are many, has a theme. As you walk through Marilyn’s home, especially when decorated for the holidays, every turn elicits squeals of delight, waves of nostalgia. Antique Santas fill the parlor. In the kitchen you’ll find cookie cutters, and in the dining room, gorgeous colored glass dishes and china. There are children’s toys, antique buttons and purses, snowmen.
“I collect everything,” Marilyn says. “You only have to have three of something to have a collection.”
She has no idea how many of any one thing she has collected. She simply laughs at the idea of counting. “Enough,” is her only answer.
Christmas trees throughout the home are decorated with themed collections—Cinderella, Muffy Bears, Christopher Radko. Marilyn’s first Christopher Radko ornament was a girl and her dog.
“They are really special,” she says of the many Radko ornaments she has that are signed.
A silhouette collection fills a guest bath. A bedroom is decorated with pretty collections any girl would love. Marilyn’s Westies, Jefferson Davis and Dixie Belle, have a room of their own, devoted to West Highland White Terriers. The dogs are certified support dogs. Marilyn lost her brother and a favorite uncle last year, and her husband, Fred, died in April. They had been married 52 years. Jefferson and Dixie go everywhere with Marilyn and have a calming effect on her.
“I’m keeping busy,” she says. Returning to her childhood home on Manzanita Beach near Wheeler, Oregon for the summer helped Marilyn grieve. She rented a beach house for several months, walked along the Pacific, attended a high school reunion, played with her dogs. She can remember being fascinated as a girl by the shop windows in Manzanita filled with scenes made from shells. Many years later those scenes would influence the tiny vignettes Marilyn designed and created for the garden railroad she and Fred built in their yard. See the April/May 2016 issue of Marvelous! for a story about this unique railroad.
Manzanita is where Marilyn’s love of collecting began. “I started collecting storybook dolls as a girl,” she says. “Nancy dolls and Alice in Wonderland.”
She came home one day from fourth grade with a beautifully drawn picture of Christopher Columbus.
“I loved sketching people,” she says. She used pencils and crayons. Her mother nurtured Marilyn’s natural artistic talent and instilled in her a love of decorating.
“My mother was very particular,” Marilyn says. Her earliest Christmas memory is of helping her mother put tinsel on the tree. Marilyn called it rain. Her mother taught her to place rows of tinsel on each branch individually, evenly spaced, just so.
“Now I don’t do rain,” Marilyn says, shaking her head. It’s too much trouble.
She met Fred on the first day of classes her junior year at Baylor University. He was a business management student. She was studying physical therapy. After graduation, he went into banking, introducing credit cards to shop owners in Dallas. She specialized in hand therapy and would eventually run her own hand clinic in Tulsa for 28 years. She still laughs about the first Christmas tree she and Fred put up as a young married couple.
“Fred and a friend found a cedar tree, cut it down, and put it in the trunk of the car,” Marilyn remembers. “The top 24 inches of the tree hung out of the trunk and were black from exhaust and road dirt.”
They put the tree up anyway. They couldn’t afford ornaments, so Marilyn hung pine cones on the tree and made some ornaments from egg cartons.
The couple had two children. Lisa lives in Montana; Eric in Kansas. “I was always the designated decorator at school,” she says, laughing. It was a job she clearly loved. At home, Fred put the lights on the tree. Marilyn did all the other decorating. Fred was the cook.
“The decorations are far more important than the food,” Marilyn says with a smile, “and decorating packages is as important to me as decorating the house.”
She chooses a color and a theme every year, and everything is beautifully coordinated. This year, without Fred, the holiday will be different, of course. Will Marilyn decorate?
“I’m thinking not,” she says, “but I’m not sure I can do ‘not.’ Maybe one area.”
It will be difficult for her to choose one area, I suspect. She confesses that she doesn’t like change. On occasion, she has given away ornaments and pieces of her collections, but she has some regrets about that and still misses the pieces. When Fred retired from banking and opened Noah’s Pantry, a boutique pet store in Tulsa, Marilyn decorated the shop, including a little boy mannequin. It was one of the things she gave away when they moved to the Twin Lakes Area. It’s one of the pieces she misses most.
Was Fred supportive of her collecting? “Oh, yes!” she says. “We did a lot of antique shopping together. We would rather go antiquing than to a movie and dinner. It’s the same time and money, and we loved the hunt. It’s a form of entertainment.”
She still goes to antique malls, but she puts what she calls “stoppers” on herself. No more silhouettes unless…. Most of the time her self-imposed parameters work, but she still buys Christmas ornaments from time to time, usually the day after Christmas, to fill the holes, she says. But she doesn’t know where she’ll put them.
“That’s why you end up with so many trees!” M! December 2016/January 2017
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