SEATTLE – Visitors entering St. Joseph School will find a 30-foot-long Christmas village, with many of the pieces made by students in a woodshop class taught by Chito Santos.
Three years ago, when Santos started teaching at the K-8 Seattle school, a Christmas tree adorned the lobby during Advent.
“I told the principal it would be nice to highlight Jesus as the real reason for the season, the birth of Jesus,” Santos said.
He proposed a Nativity scene with a surrounding village of miniature buildings.
“I thought it would be nice to make the creche more interesting,” Santos explained.
The collection has grown from 12 buildings the first year to this year’s display with 40 structures. The creche is front and center, featuring larger figures and stable, Santos said. The village includes houses and buildings that highlight occupations like blacksmith and fabric seller.
The buildings are made in Santos’ woodshop class, one of the trimester-long exploratory programs that middle-school students take. Students choose one exploratory per trimester and meet in their class for 55 minutes, three times per week, according to Rebecca Frisino, the school’s director of marketing and communications.
St. Joseph students craft buildings for the village in the school’s woodshop. (Courtesy St. Joseph School)Gathering the students in a space used for the school’s in-house projects, Santos begins each class with a prayer. Students learn geometry skills, how to safely use power tools (many of the tools were donated) and project planning. Santos said he stresses the importance of wearing safety equipment and not allowing any horseplay that could lead to accidents.
Students learn that — even with a plan — changes may occur during construction, Santos said. New ideas occur. A piece of wood is cut the wrong length. Color combinations might not work as anticipated. Santos helps students with details that require more finesse, such as banisters or steep-pitched roofs. And he taught them how to use spackling to create the look of concrete.
Buildings in the village are named for the students who constructed them, such as the bakery known as Miller’s Bread Shop. The two-story structure is constructed from scrap wood and furnished with tiny loaves of bread made from Styrofoam and baskets.
No village is complete without a baker, and Miller’s Bread Shop is ready for business with miniature loaves of bread. (Courtesy Rebecca Frisino)When one student was unable to finish a project, Santos said he set up ladders and scaffolding to make the rough-walled house look as if it’s under construction.
The village also features a functioning 40-inch-high windmill turned by a repurposed rotisserie electric motor, he said.
After Christmas, the buildings will be packed up. Although students take their other class projects home, the village buildings are stored in Santos’ office to be featured in next year’s display.
“You really feel the excitement, the sense of accomplishment once they come up with something presentable,” Santos said.
Eighth grader Isabella L. is currently taking her fifth trimester of Santos’ woodshop class. Learning a skill she might use in the future and helping the school are really nice, she said.
Isabella has two buildings — one a fabric shop and the other a wine and spirits shop — featured in the installation. Crafting each taught her about dimensions, perspective and making things fit together visually and proportionally, she said.
“Mr. Santos has a ton of experience and has shown us a lot of new things,” Isabella said. “It is fun to share our work with everyone.”
The village water wheel, Lange Fabrics and the watchtower are seen in this scene of Christmas Village. The display of 40 buildings is 30 feet long and 10 feet deep. (Courtesy Rebecca Frisino)