“You want to create an atmosphere to make everybody feel warm and fuzzy,” said Jan Barrett, a holiday decorating veteran and owner of the Ware Street Inn, in answer to the title question. In pursuit of that ambition, great care is given to each detail for guests to feel the warmth and magic of the holiday season at this Lewiston bed-and-breakfast.

Wreaths, scents, ornaments

Beginning with the columns entwined in evergreen, holiday red ribbon at the outside entryway, and the “great big huge wreath spotlighted on the chimney” accompanied with “wreaths on every window,” folks can easily perceive the holiday spirit at work here. After crossing the threshold, perhaps visitors will note the tantalizing aroma of cinnamon sticks and clove simmering in a nearby crockpot as they gaze at the spiral staircase adorned with greens and poinsettia. Other festive evidence of the season surface as well.

“The huge Christmas tree is super decorated with all kinds of stuff,” said Barrett. “It isn’t decorated with the balls all red, or with one theme like people do a lot today, but a hodgepodge, the way people used to decorate. I don’t have all handmade decorations,” she explained, but her tree ornaments are the results of decades of acquisitions.

Christmas village

Concealing the accouterments of modern-day technology when not in use, a nearby mahogany entertainment center serves a double purpose. On the top is an elaborate Christmas village that has taken 10 years to amass and is still growing.

The Christmas village scene includes “a B&B, a brew pub, a bakery, little nuns in a snowball fight, and a priest riding by on a bicycle,” said Barrett. There’s the usual “couple skating on a pond that’s actually a mirror.”

Stockings by the fireplace

For added ambience, Barrett said, “We turn on the fireplace and next thing you know that makes everyone gravitate to the living room. People will get their reading glasses and a book and cozy up in chairs and couches. Even the students from Bates College will take a book and get on the rug and read. They’ll (guests) even put their hands up to it to warm them up,” she chuckled as she clarified that the stove is more aesthetic than functional.

The fireplace mantle is draped with natural looking greens (to eliminate fire hazards, they’re artificial) to which she adds pine cones, hand-carved bird ornaments and other whimsical items to produce a nature-scene effect.

Maybe for some the “stockings are hung by the chimney with care,” but guests will find them complete with a candy cane hanging on their room doors. Additionally, each room has its own fully decorated, miniature Christmas tree.

Taste of baked goods

As if this cornucopia of holiday sights and smells is not enough, Barrett indulges her patrons’ taste buds with an array of baked goods including a very old recipe for an eggless chocolate cake called ‘Duplicate Cake’ because, she emphasized, “It’s so good you want to make it over and over and over again.”

Barrett’s friend and neighbor, Andrea Quaid, enjoys going over to the Inn because, “It’s so beautiful. At Christmas, it’s absolutely gorgeous.” Quaid has her own ingredients to make a wonderful old-fashioned Christmas for her family, too. Although quick to admit her cultural background is not French, spending time living in France has resulted in her incorporating some of their traditions.

“A couple of days before Christmas I make a Buche de Noel.” Quaid added, “On Christmas Eve we stay up late. Some years we go to Midnight Mass, depending on what the family wants to do, then come home, have a meal, something light, then we open presents.” Quaid described this event as a “Reveillion,” something many locals with French Canadian heritage have experienced.

Fortunately, for those whose time constraints or culinary expertise don’t allow for making a Buche de Noel (aka Christmas Log – the English translation for this baked delicacy), Quaid stated that two local bakeries, Grant’s and the Italian Bakery, usually carry this item during the holidays.

Midnight service and family dinner

A Ware Street Inn staff member, Sheila Sylvester, or “SheShe” as she is more commonly known, has her own rendition of what constitutes an old-fashioned Christmas from many years ago when she was a child: attending a midnight Christmas Eve service, having both sets of grandparents over for Christmas dinner, and best of all, she said with great fondness, “My sister, Ellen, and I used to get up on Christmas day and before we would open the presents we would sing, ‘Happy Birthday’ to Jesus.”

Duplicate Cake

This recipe is from Jan Barrett’s former mother-in-law. She was a very frugal woman who still cooked on a wood stove back in the 1960s, not just because she lived during the Great Depression, but because she had five kids and her husband was the sole bread winner. It is a very moist chocolate cake. Missing in this recipe are eggs and milk – perhaps they were scarce at the time the recipe was developed.

2 C. sugar

3 C. flour

1 tsp. salt

1/2 C. bakers cocoa

2 tsp. baking soda

2 Tbsp. vinegar

1 tsp. vanilla

2/3 C. salad oil (vegetable oil)

2 C. water

Mix all ingredients together by hand til smooth (batter will be thin). Bake in 9 x 13 greased pan for 35-40 minutes in a 350 degree oven. Top with peanut butter (or any other kind) frosting or none at all (some folks have been known to eat it hot right out of the oven with butter) and watch it disappear.

– Courtesy of Ware Street Inn

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