Woman aims to put Kildare on the map

Oreta Wright has a secret about Kildare, her hometown: No one seems to know where it is.

So this Christmas, Oreta is decorating Kildare in an old-fashioned way, which is the taking of things you have around the house and saved through the years, giving them a holiday festooning and putting them outside for neighbors and visitors to see.

The idea is to put Kildare on the map.

The event happens in the daylight because it's before the arrival of electricity, don't you see?

She's even calling her village "Whoville" and placing 10 or so cartoon panels along her front yard, which is the main road through the community. These panels will tell the story of the grinch who stole-or tried to steal-Kildare's Christmas.

"Not gonna happen here" is her message.

One drives or walks around and will see a little red-and-white Santa Claus holding onto a highway guardrail or Frosty the Snowman leaning against the trunk of a tree at the edge of a dark forest.

In another place, a snow-covered New England farmhouse sits among the fall leaves of Northeast Texas. One particularly exciting find will be to discover the tree with its holiday decorations of painted tin cans.

Over at the First Baptist Church, it appears Mary, Joseph, angels and the wise men have grins on their faces. Sheep are bounding around.

Wright is the artist and she's done most of this single-handedly.

"Kildare doesn't exist any more, really," she tells. "It's a senior village.

"When I moved here 30 years ago, there was a busy sawmill, cotton gin, oil fields. We shipped iron ore. Little stores were all around. A school. You didn't go to town, it was all right here."

Now it's all gone, she reflected.

"The buildings are gone. We only have three churches and a post office that's open four hours a day."

But it's why a traditional Christmas and holiday season will work here, she believes. Families and villages in the older days decorated with what they had. And so, she's done this. It's a project that began six months ago and taken all of November just to hang up.

"All it took was to get permission of the land owners," she said. "I have saved so many decorations through the years, I could almost decorate the village myself."

The idea is to use what you have, what can be found and at no cost.

"I think I have $15 in this project so far," Wright said.

Wright said she doesn't want the credit and acknoledged she had help. Mary Echols, Carolyn Keener and Karen Ham decorated the post office. Busebio Ramirez and his son Collin did work, and Greta's grandson from Houston, Paul Cranford, came up and spent some time helping his grandmother.

It will be interesting to see if others in the community between now and Christmas add their own traditional decorations, either this year or next.

But for now, the idea is for the public to come out and find where Kildare is. Drive through or walk around.

If you get there on a certain weekend, you'll find Oreta Wright engaged in another project. She's the "Cookie Lady." She bakes 48 dozen cookies, puts them in jars with a skirt and Christmas note, and then delivers one to every home she knows in the community and to nursing homes as well.

"You can have good Christmas without cost," she said. "That's what we used to do. Let everything be homemade. Use them for the time and then pack them up and save for next year."

And if it puts Kildare on the map, all the better. Merry Christmas, she said.