The Governor’s Mansion in Springfield is all dressed for the holidays. It has always taken a fair amount of fa-la-la.
The Governor’s Mansion in Springfield looks lovely right now, at the holidays. If you happen to be near, swing by. It is, after all, the people’s house, and if you are a resident of Illinois, it’s your house, too (albeit, only certain rooms during designated visiting hours; also, don’t touch anything, and forget spending the night, but it’s yours). With that in mind, I drove to Springfield the other day to see how my holiday decorations look. I was inspired by a new book, “A House That Made History: The Illinois Governor’s Mansion, Legacy of an Architectural Treasure,” by our state’s first lady M.K. Pritzker.
The archival images in the book of Christmas decorations at the Governor’s Mansion suggested I’d find something smart, predictable yet elegantly designed. Still, J.B. does seem to be mulling a White House run, so I was secretly concerned my holiday decorations could lean populist. Would they put inflatable Minions on the lawn?
“Nobody told me I couldn’t!” the first lady told me.
“And no, I haven’t,” she added. “But this house is really the home of the governor, and you do have the leeway to do what you want. You are only limited by your imagination.”
Indeed, earlier this year, M.K. Pritzker hosted the Floating Museum, a Chicago art collective that really did install an enormous inflatable monument to Illinois on the lawn. She studied historical preservation in her graduate school days at the School of the Art Institute, and brought in Obama White House interior designer Michael S. Smith to artfully spruce up the Springfield residence, the largest governor’s mansion in the country. That said, as I pulled up to the mansion, I knew immediately I needn’t have been worried. Though I am a fan of vintage plastic blow-mold Santas and Rudolphs of midcentury Christmases past (sadly, nowhere in sight), and I noticed a distinct lack of frosted snow spray on the window panes, there was a seamless mix of classic Christmas decor and cheesy Christmas tchotchkes that suggested an actual family spends at least some actual holiday time in this old place.
Classy: Large matching wreaths across iron gates and windows, designed by the first lady herself, melding golds, silvers, blues, oranges, berries and tin ornaments of birds.
Cheesy: Corndog ornaments, tiny top hats as table centerpieces.
In Gov. J.B. Pritzker’s mansion office, beside his desk, is what the staff here call the Sports Tree, an average-size Christmas tree covered exclusively in novelty ornaments, winter hats and scarves that bear the logos of Illinois sports teams, collegiate and professional. University of Illinois football helmets, Cubs No. 1 foam fingers, Blackhawks scarves. Marilyn Cagnoni, the first lady’s chief of staff, led me through the mansion alongside Mikito Muroya, a guide and historian for Springfield historical sites. Cagnoni said that people ask her why there are no St. Louis Cardinals ornaments, considering the Cards are closer to Springfield than the Cubs or White Sox.
As if on cue, I noticed, egads, a St. Louis Cards cap, right there in the tree.
“Oh, no! Did someone sneak that in?” she asked, horrified, chuckling nervously. “See, OK, well, see — now this is what happens when you don’t micromanage!”
Oh, and right here, I said, noting two ornaments of St. Louis jerseys.
She groaned. “At least they’re in the back of the tree.”
Outside the office, rubbing it in, kidding, I asked if the Pritzkers personally killed all of the bird ornaments perched in the 20-foot tree at the center of the mansion. “OK, you are giving me the highest level of anxiety,” she laughed, then answered, deadpan, playing along: Yes, sure, of course, the Pritzkers are killing birds and doing taxidermy.
“M.K. does likes a project!” she added.
Then, serious: “No, but really, she is a project person.”
To be clear, the first lady of the state of Illinois is not killing small birds and wiring them into Christmas trees. Those birds were very fake. In fact, the Christmas trees — all 20 of them, including a 30-foot pre-lit tree on the lawn — are completely fake. Just don’t call them “fake.” “We prefer permanent,” said Harry Lewis, the mansion’s longtime horticulturalist. The grounds contain 46 plant species, and past gubernatorial administrations have had real Christmas trees, but you need fire marshals and watering — who needs it? Plus, those faux evergreens, white pines and spruces scattered do look real.
“For many years,” Lewis continued, “there was no funding (for holiday decorating); trees were donated and stored in the attic. We would do this thing where we invited the staffs of historic sites around Illinois to design their own trees. Those were all over the mansion, but it would look pretty busy and disjointed, and when Rauner was in office, (former first lady Diana Rauner) didn’t like it much. She was more of a minimalistic person. There’s definitely more interest in decorations now. It is a whole different look.”
If there’s a name for the holiday stylings of M.K. Pritzker, call it: coffee-table book ready.
Traditional, yet clever. Cozy, yet playful.
On the first floor, silver trees, lightly decorated, sit on tables, swaddled in satin, like upscale Charlie Brown Christmas trees. In the State Dining Room, stockings hang from fireplace mantels, thin matching trees stand at attention. On the dining table, gold party crackers ready to snap and, as the centerpiece, a large silver punch bowl overflows with holiday greens, that, Muroya explained, had been made for the USS Illinois, a World War II battleship that was never completed. At each place setting, there is a name card, the guest list drawn up by the first lady that includes: Scrooge, Buddy, Rudolph, George Bailey, the Grinch. The governor’s seat is between Kriss Kringle and Clark Griswold, which, when you think of it, is not a terrible way of describing the governor.
M.K. Pritzker designs and creates many of the decorations herself — with help from women inmates at nearby prisons who are studying interior design. They were invited to the mansion just after Halloween to build centerpieces and dress the trees.
Cagnoni describes decorating the first Christmas after Gov. Pritzker was elected in 2018 as a “a scavenger hunt.” The first lady said, “We started from zero because (the decorations) there were old and not in very good shape — not one penny of state money had gone to decorations, everything was donated.” The first family ended up paying themselves for most of what decorates the mansion now; many of those decorations were bought their first year in office. Asked how much they spent to dress the mansion for the holidays, M.K. Pritzker would only say, “Thousands — but we do reuse everything.”
Some of the images in her book of past Christmases at the mansion provide nice reminders that the Pritzkers aren’t the only first family to go all out for the holidays. Sure, the Stratton administration in the 1950s seemed to overdo it a bit with tinsel, but then so did my family in the 1970s. More interesting is an image of Christmas during the Yates years of the early 1900s: First lady Helen Wadsworth Yates filled entire rooms with Spanish moss and Japanese lanterns. Gov. Henry Horner, in the 1930s, offered his visitors a real horse-pulled sleigh ride that embarked from the steps of the mansion.
The Governor’s Mansion, yesterday and today, was historically a bit of this and that.
As Muroya explained, most of its furniture was brought in by new administrations and handed off to the next, gubernatorial administration after administration. There’s little here that was here in 1855, when the mansion was built by architect John Van Osdel, who also designed early iterations of Chicago City Hall and the Palmer House. M.K. Pritzker said her family does not spend the majority of their time in the house, but then, soon after Gov. Joel Matteson moved his family into the mansion in 1856, he left for a place across the street. The Governor’s Mansion is made of pressed red brick, but was painted white for decades. Despite falling apart over time, it didn’t get funding from the Illinois General Assembly to be restored until 1971, 116 years after it was built.
Its largest renovation — a $15 million project, led by the Rauner administration, which closed the house to the public during 2017 — was finished in 2018. M.K. Pritzker is quick to give former first lady Rauner credit for restoring the bones of the house, “but it was such a tremendous effort, they didn’t have the time to do the decorating of the house.”
“A House That Made History” is, in many ways, a cataloging of this last stage, which filled and transformed many rooms with pieces loaned by the State Museum, the Lincoln Presidential Library and Pritzker’s own art collection. If you think of state buildings and historic sites as static, musty places full of portraits of forgotten politicians and generals, it can be a shock to notice a work from Theaster Gates dominating an entire hallway.
The mansion’s new mix of contemporary and antique is why it’s not especially caustic to recognize a painting by Karl Wirsum overlooking two gold reindeer statues, or a mural by Chicago’s Simes Studios serving as backdrop to a silver menorah, or a twisty abstracted sculpture by the Chicago artist Richard Hunt at one end of the Lincoln Room.
If you’re wondering where the religious iconography is — where the Christ is in this Christmas, so to speak — well, not unlike a lot of contemporary art, there isn’t much. “Certainly we didn’t want to offend anyone in any way,” M.K. Pritzker said. “It was a goal of mine to remain neutral.” Typically, the nearby State Capitol has a handful of religious decorations in its rotunda, from nativity scenes to installations by the Satanic Temple of Illinois. But since that building is being renovated, there are no displays at all this year.
Other than menorahs, the nearest thing to religion in the holiday decorations is the sports tree, and even there, asked about including unholy St. Louis, M.K. Pritzker said:
“Everyone should feel represented.”
And probably, you would. Themed Christmas trees are big in the Pritzker mansion. Other than that sports tree, there’s a music tree full of bronzed violins and trumpets. In the ballroom, beside the gubernatorial podium, there are two trees full of ornaments representing first responders, including crystal ornaments inscribed with the names of police, fire and military members from Illinois who died in the past 12 months. The Lincoln Room has a small table tree with ornaments of JFK and FDR and suffragettes.
In the library, the Illinois tree — the one with a state fair corn dog — offers miniature Route 66 signs, monarch butterflies, Ferris wheels, pumpkins, Lincoln busts, Chicago skylines.
The governor was raised Jewish and the first lady converted, but overall, it’s a very secular, pretty mainstream American holiday display, generous and smart without feeling overly tasteful and dull. My downstate Christmas decorations look pretty good. I would do a little more with the lights outside. And definitely add a blow-mold. And maybe a themed Christmas tree weighed down with problems, broken bridge ornaments to represent a crumbling infrastructure, a foggy sunset to symbolize murky pension funds.
Holidays are melancholy, after all.
I asked the first lady’s chief of staff if that was all the trees. Did I miss any?
“I don’t think so,” she said. “Why? You got something in mind for next Christmas?”
