PUHI — Everywhere you look in Lyn Ratcliffe’s cozy home there are angels – 1,426 of them to be exact — and counting. Large ones, small ones, a frog angel and even an angel who is fishing. Angels decorate every
PUHI — Everywhere you look in Lyn Ratcliffe’s cozy home there are angels – 1,426 of them to be exact — and counting. Large ones, small ones, a frog angel and even an angel who is fishing.
Angels decorate every table, cabinet and countertop. They’re on walls, dangling from chains strung from ceiling fans to the corners of each room and embroidered on bedspreads.
Ratcliffe, 84, a delightfully cheerful and quick-witted woman, has been collecting cherubs since she was 8 years old. Through the years she’s been gifted hundreds of the creatures by family and friends. Each angel has a story, and a good memory.
“I’ve been a very lucky lady,” Ratcliffe said, smiling at the special memories each angel evokes. “These angels connect me to so many people.”
Each year at the beginning of the holiday season, Ratcliffe retrieves boxes of carefully packed seraphs from her closet shelves and from her son’s home, where the overflow is stored.
Lovingly she arranges the angels throughout her condominium, then invites friends and acquaintances for guided tours of her collection. After the tour, guests are treated to glasses of cold spiced cider and homemade cookies – three flavors, one of each for every guest.
“People ask me ‘Why do you go to all this trouble?’ It’s such a joy,” she said. “Why wouldn’t I show people? I love people to see them.”
Indeed, with angels watching and floating from almost every inch of her home, the atmosphere is light and lovely. Several angel replicas of her beloved black and white 11-year-old Boston Terrier Mugsy, lend an air of whimsy.
Ratcliffe credits her adoptive mother with starting her on the road to collecting, when she gave Ratcliffe her first angel. “My mother was an angel,” she said.
What a collection it is. There’s an angel made of whalebone that her daughter brought back from a visit to Catalina. There’s the pig angel, angel soaps, angel candles and a collection of angel hand bells. “The older ones sound best, of course,” she said.
There’s an entire table covered with miniature angels, including a handful under glass that had been cake decorations, so tiny a person could have swallowed one with a bite of cake and not even known it.
One angel is made from a clothespin. One holding a flashlight is apparently prepared for anything.
It’s a lot of work setting her treasures out for display, then carefully repacking them at the end of each holiday season. “You’ve got to use tissue paper and Kleenex around the wings or else they break,” Ratcliffe said.
The effort is worth it every year.
“I love waking up in the morning and seeing them flying over my bed.”
