This JoCo gardener enjoyed ‘chance of a lifetime’ decorating White House for Christmas
There she was, Wendy Clay from DeSoto, Kansas, walking into the East Wing of the White House the day after Thanksgiving when other folks were Black Friday shopping and cleaning up after the holiday.
There she was, a Johnson County master gardener invited to spend three days decorating the White House for Christmas.
“I’m thinking to myself, ‘here’s my day job. This is just my day job for the next three days. No big deal,’” she told The Star.
Oh, but it was a big deal for Clay, one of 300 volunteers chosen from thousands for the privilege of decking the halls and rooms of the People’s House in this year’s theme of “A Season of Peace and Light.”
This will the last Christmas celebrated there by President Joe Biden and First Lady Jill Biden. About 100,000 visitors are expected to visit the house this holiday season and they are sure to see some of Clay’s handiwork.
“I wanted to soak in every minute,” said Clay.
She was assigned to team “Comet” — like Santa’s reindeer: about two dozen volunteers who decorated the Grand Foyer, the recognizable formal entrance to the White House facing Pennsylvania Avenue.
But their biggest task was assembling more than 1,000 white paper doves suspended overhead in the central hallway.
She was also there for the arrival of every holiday season’s centerpiece — the gingerbread reproduction of the White House. The volunteer workers lined up to greet the pastry marvel, which this year includes a scene of ice skaters on the South Lawn.
“It was one of the coolest moments when that came in,” Clay said, adding she’d “never seen smiles so wide” as those worn by the White House pastry chefs.
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She had applied twice before to be a volunteer decorator and had to pass a background check after she was formally invited via a congratulatory email on a Sunday in October. (No parking tickets. No speeding tickets. No unpaid taxes. She wasn’t worried about passing it.)
“This was the third time I applied and it was the culmination of a 16-year-old dream,” said Clay, who applied online in August. “I saw an HGTV program about (the decorating process) in 2008 and thought, ‘I really want to do that.’
“I kind of set my sights on that goal and this year I finally made it.”
The awesomeness of her surroundings hit one day when she walked into the library during a break. This year the room is decorated with a forest of vintage ceramic trees.
Watching the volunteers work, Clay looked up and spied George Washington’s sword hanging on a wall.
“Think about that. The sword and sheath,” she said.
Hands off the walls
Once inside she learned quickly about the rules of the historic house, built between 1792 and 1800.
Do not touch the walls, some of them marble, some handpainted with murals, some covered with imported silk.
Do not lay even a piece of paper on the antique tables.
Paper protected the floors in the room where the volunteers ate buffet breakfasts, “enough to fill you up but I was kind of surprised that we were fed on paper plates with plastic utensils,” Clay said.
Volunteers, who worked 7 a.m. to 5 p.m., couldn’t have their cell phones with them, either, probably more to keep them on task than for any security reasons, Clay guessed.
She bought her own plane ticket and paid for her own hotel room in D.C. “I think that’s important for the taxpayers to know,” she said.
She did get an apron to wear that says White House on the front. “We wore that all three days, with great big pockets perfect for scissors and wire. They came in handy,” she said.
Clay has been a member of the Johnson County Extension Master Gardeners since 2001. She’s given at least 5,000 hours of her time over two decades volunteering with the extension, many of them in demonstration gardens designed to help local home gardeners.
She’s a whiz with flowers, recently co-chairing the decorating committee for the International Master Gardeners conference, which brought a crowd of gardening enthusiasts and experts to Overland Park last year.
In 2003 she started a business called Clay Pots, creating container plantings but branching into landscaping, yard work and indoor floral decorating by customer request.
She’s not sure how many of her fellow White House volunteers had similar horticultural experience. They came from all walks. There were a lot of teachers, for instance, including state Teachers of the Year, maybe because of Jill Biden’s own education background, she figured.
Interior designers, members of the military — “that was big,” she said — and Gold Star family members had been chosen, too.
The design plan was already professionally set before Clay and the other volunteers got to D.C. They weren’t allowed to do certain tasks.
For instance, White House staff, more knowledgeable about the “working museum” needs of the house, hung all of the garlands — they were felt-backed so they don’t scratch anything, Clay said.
“My group was probably the biggest because we had the biggest area to cover,” she said.
Team Comet decorated six tall trees in the Grand Foyer in what Clay called “White House style,” meaning they had so many ornaments on them “you can’t see the tree,” she said. “A little is good, more is even better. So they just packed the trees full.”
They also had to wrap hundreds of various-sized faux gift boxes to go under the tree.
She said all 83 Christmas trees in the White House “are real. I don’t know where they got them. There wasn’t one brown needle, there were no holes. They were just beautiful.
“And the Park Service would come in every night and check the water reservoirs.”
Compared to faux trees, they were easy to decorate. At the White House, larger ornaments are hung toward the inside, closer to the trunk, with smaller ones nearer the ends of branches to create a feeling of depth, Clay said.
And each ornament had to be tied on so they don’t fall off when hundreds of visitors brush past. “It was time-consuming,” she said.
The paper doves her team assembled, made of heavy white paper, were already folded with pinpricks at the top, through which volunteers threaded fishing line for hanging.
Suspended from the ceiling, the birds flutter with the slightest movement beneath them. “It was just breathtaking,” Clay said.
At the end of one work day, the volunteers were ushered onto the South Lawn for a ceremony honoring World AIDS Day. For the first time, sections of the AIDS Memorial Quilt were displayed on the lawn, honoring lives lost to HIV/AIDS.
Clay found herself standing not far from the podium. A fan of the Bidens, she was excited to see both approaching.
“I started to get teary-eyed,” she said. “I wanted to reach into my pocket for a Kleenex, but there were Secret Service on either side, with the sunglasses and ear pieces and trench coats, and I thought, ‘I’m not reaching for anything.’”
At their own reception, Jill Biden thanked her army of volunteers one last time.
“It’s been incredible to watch all of you transform this space year after year,” she said.
She thanked them for trading time with their families to spend time with hot glue guns and “tired wrists from wiring ornaments to the trees because, you know, you can’t just hang it; it has to be, you know, hung perfectly,” she said.
“And ... you have to wrap them around and around the branch so the ornaments stay on, because you know thousands of kids are coming through here and they’re going to try to pull them off ... they always try to.
“But it’s during those long afternoons when your hands are sore from cutting the ribbons just so, from hanging the greenery, that’s when these lifelong friendships are made. And that’s when the magic happens.
“So, I’m already hearing about the text chains you’re creating to keep in touch. I wish you could add my name to those.”
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