The chill in the garage at Ray and Lolita Moone’s Van Lynn Road property doesn’t make it any less of an inviting place to spend the afternoon. Country music plays in the background and the scent of freshly cut balsam fills the space as the couple work alongside each other assembling wreaths for the upcoming holiday season.
“I can’t really even smell the balsam anymore,” Ray admits as he sets a completed wreath aside in his garage turned workshop.
Armed with clippers and a pair of gloves, the Moones are the perfect picture of Minnesota born-and-raised craftspeople. The couple, which celebrated 50 years of marriage in August, began making wreaths about 20 winters ago as more of a hobby than a side job.
“When my mom and dad were younger and healthy, we’d go pick bundles of boughs with them,” Lolita said. “After dad passed away, we started making wreaths.”
The couple leaped into the business full force with a contract for about 2,000 wreaths a season with Mickman Brothers Inc. – a landscaping business in Anoka.
“(The company) ships wreaths all over the world,” Ray said. “It’s a huge business.”
The Moones provided wreaths to Mickman Brothers until about four years ago when Lolita had a knee replacement. Ray suffers from multiple sclerosis, and the couple decided it was time to slow down on their customer base.
“From then on,” Lolita said as she almost automatically clipped off brown needles from a balsam bough, “we just starting making wreaths for friends and businesses in town.”
The couple’s signature wreaths each weigh about five pounds and are garnished with a bow and two hand-picked pine cones the couple pairs together to be an almost exact match.
Shortly after they stopped shipping wreaths to Mickman’s, Lolita said she was contacted by the International Falls Figure Skating Club to sell the Moone’s wreaths as a fundraiser.
“It’s worked out really good,” she said of making wreaths for the club to sell. “They get more every year from us. This year they sold more than 200.”
“And they get to make some money,” Ray said. “It works out for everyone.”
Prep work
Preparing for the wreath-making season begins in about October when the couple, armed with the required permits, starts harvesting the sticky boughs.
“We always say we’ll start assembling wreaths before it gets too cold, but that’s half the problem,” Ray said. “We have to wait for the cold.”
To prevent needs from dropping, Lolita said gathering balsam boughs doesn’t begin until Mother Nature has three hard freezes under her belt for the season.
And the couple say they are selective in picking what is needed to fill wreath orders.
“This year, there were a lot of (boughs) with brown needles,” Lolita said. “We always avoid those. It is getting harder to find enough boughs that will work”
The pair said this year, they picked “just 1,500 pounds.”
Just?
While it may seem extensive to a non-wreath maker, Ray said years ago when he and Lolita were preparing to ship 2,000 wreaths to Mickman Brothers, they would pick about 1,500 pounds in one day.
Lolita added her late mother, Myrtle Ferguson, would help her daughter and son-in-law pick boughs until she was in her mid 80s and confined to a walker.
“She’d pick 300 pounds per day,” Ray said, adding with a chuckle, “She’d get mad when we wouldn’t take her with us.”
A loving routine
Most order requests are for the day following Thanksgiving and Ray and Lolita say they spend about five hours each day in their garage assembling the holiday trimmings.
“We do not go for speed, we go for quality,” Ray said as he clips another handful of boughs. “We do our best to make the best wreaths we can.”
The about 250 wreaths the couple will sell this year, Lolita said, pays for added expenses brought on by winter.
“It helps pay for our heat and hay for the horses,” she said, referring to the four horses the couple has in a pasture behind their home.
When asked if they do much talking as they work, Ray and Lolita said they mostly listen to the radio.
“We are so thankful for the radio,” Lolita said. “But we do talk now and then. Once we get busy, time just flies.”
Still having spent half a century together, Lolita said the hobby-turned-side job has only strengthened the couple’s marriage.
“We have so much in common,” she said flashing a grin at her husband, who notices her gesture despite concentrating on clipping boughs. “This is just another routine we have together.”
One of the routines most noticeable is with the completion of each wreath, the person who made it holds it up for their spouse to examine.
“We give the final say on each other’s work,” Lolita said. “That way, we can see if a pine cone is too high or too low. We try to make them just right.”
