Advertorial · Holiday Edition

Yesterday | Advertorial | Karen Dobbs

“My eyes are failing, and nobody wants to take over my bench.” Why a 71-year-old jeweler from Minnesota is selling her 24 favorite handmade pieces in one advent calendar – for the first and last time

For 28 years, Loretta Kincaid made every ring, star and heart by hand. Now her eyes are failing and nobody wants the family shop – so her 24 favorite designs go into one last calendar.

Loretta Kincaid (71) at the bench by her shop window on Main Street. These are the last calendars she will ever make.

Stillwater, November. The St. Croix River is steaming in the cold, and the first snow is lying in the gutters of Main Street. Inside the narrow jewelry shop between the bakery and the old bookstore, a brass lamp is burning over a scarred wooden bench. On it: a tray of tiny silver stars and hearts, a coil of fine chain, a row of gold rings no wider than a dime, and a stack of flat little boxes with the number 24 on the front. Her father opened the shop in 1958, and Loretta has sat at this bench almost every morning since 1980. This year, she is counting the mornings she has left.

“Last spring the eye doctor in St. Paul said the words I was afraid of,” she says, and takes off her glasses. “Macular degeneration. The middle of whatever I look at is going soft, like a smudge on a window.” For most people, that means trouble reading the newspaper. For a jeweler, it means the end. “A jump ring is smaller than a grain of rice. I have to see the gap to close it. Some mornings now I simply can’t.”

She has decided to stop before the work gets worse. “I would rather end with my best calendar than with one I’m ashamed of,” she says. “Every piece that leaves this bench has always been right. I want the last ones to be right too.”

28 Novembers, more than 7,000 calendars – and it all began with one little girl

The idea was born out of an empty wallet. In the fall of 1998 the shop had a slow year, and Loretta’s daughter Jenna, then nine, wanted an advent calendar like the girls at school had. “The store ones were cardboard and cheap chocolate,” Loretta remembers. “So I sat down at the bench one night and made her 24 little pieces of jewelry instead. I sawed a star out of silver sheet, bent tiny earrings, hammered a ring she could bend to fit. She opened one door every morning before school and wore it to class.”

By Christmas, the other mothers knew. The next November, eleven of them came into the shop asking for one. The year after, forty. By the 2000s the calendar had become a Stillwater tradition: around 250 every year, picked up at the counter, never mailed. Loretta has done the math – more than 7,000 calendars in 28 years, more than 168,000 little doors.

Every star is sawn, filed and shaped by hand at the bench – work her eyes won’t manage much longer.

What’s behind the 24 doors

From the outside it’s a flat, sparkling copper-gold box with a heart and the number 24 on the front. Look a little closer and you’ll see 24 small numbered doors cut right into the front – one for every morning until Christmas.

Door number two on a December morning: a small piece of silver or gold before the coffee is even poured.

Inside are 24 pieces, all silver-plated or gold-plated, mixed so that you never know which color comes next: six fine necklaces with little pendants – a star, two hearts, a dove, an open circle, a bold star – a sparkling solitaire-style ring with a clear stone, four pairs of earrings, from small gold crescents to dangling tree-of-life discs and tiny Christmas trees, and thirteen rings.

The rings are Loretta’s favorite part. Every one of them is open at the back, so it adjusts to any finger with a gentle squeeze. “Nobody has to guess a ring size,” she says. “A grandmother can wear it, a twelve-year-old can wear it. That was the whole point from the beginning.” Some are delicate and plain, some are wavy or braided, one has a tiny gingerbread man sitting on it. “That one,” she smiles, “is always the one people tell me about.”

And there is one more rule Loretta has always told her customers: you don’t have to wait for December 1st. “Start the morning it arrives. Twenty-four mornings with something small to look forward to – that’s what it’s for, not the date on the wall.”

“Some families have come back for 25 Christmases”

Under the counter, Loretta keeps a stack of spiral notebooks. Every November since 1998, she has written down the name of every family that picked up a calendar. She opens one from 2001 and runs her finger down the page. “Here – the Halloran girls. Their mother ordered three that year.” She opens this year’s notebook. “And here they are again. Now they order for their own daughters.”

The secret, she says, is not the box. It is the work at the bench – about twelve hours for every single calendar. Loretta saws the little stars and hearts out of sheet metal, files them into shape, bends every ring around her steel mandrel, polishes each piece, checks every clasp and earring hook under the lamp, and lays it into its little door herself. “If a clasp is stiff, it doesn’t go in. If a hook is bent, it doesn’t go in. I’d rather throw a piece away than have a little girl find it broken on December 6th.”

The back room on Main Street. Every piece in these calendars was made at the bench out front – and when they are gone, there will be no more.

Why there won’t be a 30th calendar

On Sunday, December 13, Loretta will polish the last piece, wipe down the bench and turn off the brass lamp. Last winter she asked the family if anyone wanted the shop. Her daughter Jenna is a nurse in Rochester, her granddaughter Kenzie (23) has plans of her own – nobody wants to take over the bench. “When I started, there were five jewelers on Main Street,” Loretta says. “Now it’s just me, and fewer people come through that door every year. Nobody wants to learn a craft that takes ten years and pays so little. You can’t learn this in one winter. It took me ten years before my hands knew what my eyes were telling them. Now it’s the other way round.”

In the back room, exactly 347 calendars are left – her final collection. Instead of letting them sit, she has made a decision that would have been unthinkable for 28 years: for the first time ever, the calendars are being mailed outside Stillwater, and all of them at a clear special price, about half of what she normally asks. “I don’t want them on a shelf when I close the door,” she says. “I want them on somebody’s kitchen table on a dark morning.”

The idea came from Kenzie, who now does the packing and shipping until the last box is gone. “Kenzie said, Grandma, there are women in Texas and Oregon who would love this, and they’ll never come to Stillwater,” Loretta laughs. “I told her I don’t know the first thing about selling on a computer. She said, you fill the doors, I’ll do the rest.”

Why women wait all year for Loretta’s calendar:

Door by door: Loretta lays every piece in herself. If a clasp is stiff or a hook is bent, it doesn’t go in.

What her longtime regulars say

“She called me after the very first door”

Diane W. (56) from Hudson, Wisconsin, has picked up a Kincaid calendar at the counter every year since 2004. This year she sent one to her daughter Brooke, who just moved to Denver for her first job. “It’s her first Christmas away from home,” Diane says. “At 6:30 in the morning my phone rang. She was crying and laughing at the same time – door number one was the little star necklace, the same one she got in her first calendar when she was five. She said, Mom, it feels like you’re in my kitchen.”

The first door: for many families, a small morning ritual that lasts all the way to Christmas.

Where can you order Loretta’s calendar?

Loretta’s jewelry advent calendar is only available through County Craft, an online shop that works with small, independent makers. Kenzie looks after Loretta’s corner of the shop and packs every order. Only there will you get the original calendars made at the bench on Main Street. Lookalike jewelry calendars from mass production have started to appear on Amazon and the big shopping sites, and some even copy the box. What none of them has is a jeweler who made every single piece by hand.

Until December 13 – then the bench lamp goes out

“By the 13th I want every calendar to have a home,” Loretta says, and lays a finished box on the stack. “After that, I’m going to learn to enjoy Christmas from the other side of the counter.” She looks out at the snow on Main Street for a long moment. “Twenty-nine Novembers. That’s a lot of little doors.”

If you would like one of the original calendars from Loretta’s final collection, don’t wait too long. With the special price and the Christmas rush, the remaining 347 calendars are not expected to last until the 13th. Orders keep going out after the shop closes, but only for as long as the last boxes last.

It is the last chance to bring a piece of a Stillwater tradition into your own home – before the brass lamp on Main Street goes dark for good.

Our verdict

Loretta’s calendar is the kind of present people remember. It is 24 small, wearable pieces instead of 24 pieces of chocolate, every piece made by hand by a woman who has done this for almost three decades, and rings that fit every hand in the family.

A gift with real heart and a little bit of Main Street in it – thought through, carefully filled, and gone once the last box leaves the back room. Thank you, Loretta!

Readers’ first doors

Photos sent in by readers.