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“For fifty years I painted the snowmen on our Christmas card. Now I can’t paint their eyes.” — Why a 76-year-old art teacher in Bright, Victoria is letting her last 318 hand-painted candle sets go, before the house is sold this Christmas.

By Kerryn Doyle · 8 min read

Bright, Victoria. Dulcie Halloran, seventy-six, has painted her last snowman. On the shelves of the little workshop out the back, the shed Ernie built, with the window that looks up at the mountains, stand rows of white candles, three to a set, each with a snowman family painted around it by hand. Next to them sit pairs of bronze-tipped pinecones that glow from the inside.

Switch one on and a small flame comes up and leans, the way a wick does when someone walks past it. It flickers, it settles, it flickers again. Put your finger right on it and you feel nothing at all.

These are not ordinary Christmas decorations. They are candles that cannot start a fire, made by a woman who spent half a century with a husband who lit real ones, for the Christmas he was no longer allowed to.

Today Ernie Halloran is gone. Dulcie’s hands will not hold a brush steady any more. And the sets on those shelves are the last she will ever make.

Dulcie is letting them go.

Not to a shop, and not to a warehouse. She is sending what is left straight to the people who want them, one box at a time. For A$79.

This is how half a century of Christmas Eves ends, and why one widow’s decision has travelled a long way past Bright.

The art teacher and the Pom who lit every window

Dulcie Halloran grew up on a dairy farm outside Wangaratta and came up the valley in 1972 to teach art at the primary school in Bright. She stayed thirty-four years. Half the town over a certain age learned to hold a paintbrush in her classroom.

Ernie Halloran had come out from Yorkshire in 1964 as a nineteen-year-old on a ten-pound ticket and ended up working in the pine plantations around the valley. He loved Australia. He never stopped missing one thing about home, and he had one tradition he never once skipped.

“Christmas Eve, he went through the house and put a candle in every window,” Dulcie says, one hand resting on a shelf of finished sets. “Every single window, even the laundry. It was what his mum did in Halifax, for anyone who couldn’t get home. Then he’d come and stand next to me on the lawn and look back at the house. He reckoned that was the only time all year you could see a house from the outside the way it feels from the inside.”

They married in June 1974. That winter Ernie planted a pine at the corner of the yard, a sapling no taller than his knee. That December, Dulcie painted the first family Christmas card: two snowmen in scarves at a window, a little red bird on the sill. Ernie had never had a Christmas without snow before he came out, so she gave him one every year on a card, at thirty-five degrees in the shade. The snowman family grew as theirs did.

That is all there is to the design. Nobody in Bright ever needed it explained.

Over the next fifty years the pine grew taller than the house. The candles stayed in the windows every Christmas Eve, and somewhere along the way they also stopped being a safe idea.

Ernie: half a century at the same window

Every year it went the same way. Ernie would come in from the yard after dark on Christmas Eve, sunburnt, and say right then, Dul. She would put the kettle on and dig the new card out of the drawer. He would go from window to window with a box of matches.

“I painted the snowmen, but the candles were his,” Dulcie says. “I don’t think he ever thought of them as decorations. They were how he said the house was ready.”

By their sixties, Dulcie had started blowing them out behind him. A curtain that swung in on a hot northerly one year. A candle she found still burning in the spare room at two in the morning. A total fire ban day when the whole valley smelt of smoke from the hills. The cat, who had opinions about windowsills.

Between them they lit the windows on forty-nine Christmas Eves. Ernie never missed one.

Then, in 2023, he did.

The card on the door: no candles, no open flame

Ernie slipped on the wet back step on a frosty morning in July 2023. The hip was repaired. The steps at the house were not getting any easier. By spring he had moved into an aged care home in Wangaratta, three-quarters of an hour down the valley.

The room was bright and clean and cool. The house rules were printed on a card inside the door. No candles. No open flame. No heaters.

“He never complained about the room,” Dulcie says. “He complained about the window. Christmas Eve came round and he rang me and said, Dul, it’s Christmas Eve and there’s nothing in the window. Almost fifty years, and now he had a smoke detector and a ceiling fan.”

So Dulcie did what she had always done. She went out to Ernie’s old shed out the back and made him something. She poured three candles of different heights, set a small flame that moves into each one, the same lean and flicker a wick has, and painted that year’s card onto them by hand: the snowman family at the window, scarves, little red birds and all. She cast a pair of pinecones from cones off Ernie’s pine and brushed the tips bronze by hand, so they would glow in the dark the way his windows had.

The staff checked them twice. No flame. No heat. Nothing that could tip over and catch. They were allowed.

That night Ernie set them on the windowsill, switched off the lamp and rang her. “He said, it’s Christmas now. That was all. He just wanted me to know.”

Within a month the woman across the hall wanted a set. Then her son asked for one for an aunt in Benalla. By autumn Dulcie was making them, one set at a time, for families she had never met.

Ernie is gone: the shed before dawn

February 2025. Ernie Halloran passed away at the home in Wangaratta, with the candles on in his window. He and Dulcie had been married fifty years.

“He was the reason there was ever a light in that house,” she says. “Without him I’m a woman with a paintbox and nobody to paint for.”

For months she did not open the paints. Their daughter Shelley, a physio in Albury, rang every evening and offered to come down and help sort the house. Dulcie told her not yet.

One morning in May, not sleeping, she pulled on Ernie’s old flannel shirt, walked out to his shed at four o’clock and switched on the light over the bench. She propped up the last snowman painting she had done for him, the one from that final Christmas, and started pouring candles again.

“I couldn’t have told you who they were for,” she says. “There was nobody left to give them to. I made them because his shed was the only place left that didn’t feel empty.”

For nearly a year Dulcie worked every morning: pouring the candles, letting them set, painting the snowman family onto each one. Ten sets. Fifty. Three hundred and eighteen. Each one finished as if Ernie were going to set it in a window, and no two quite alike, because nobody paints a snowman, or brushes bronze onto a pinecone, the same way twice.

A flame you can’t burn yourself on

“I’ll tell you what I learned from fifty years of watching Ernie light candles,” Dulcie says. “Nobody lights a candle to see by. You light it so the room feels like somebody’s in it.”

That is where most battery candles go wrong. The cheap ones sit there with a plastic bulb that glows the same flat orange all night, and from across the room you know exactly what it is. Dulcie chose a flame that moves: it leans, catches, settles and leans again, never on a rhythm you can count. On a windowsill, from the couch or from the front lawn, it reads like a candle someone just lit.

Then there is the finger test. It takes about two seconds. Switch it on, let it burn all evening, then put your fingertip right on the flame. Nothing. No wax on the tablecloth, no smoke on the ceiling, nothing to blow out before bed, nothing for a cat’s tail or a curtain in a hot northerly to find.

Col Brennan spent thirty-one years as a CFA volunteer and brigade captain in the North East. “Candles start a lot of house fires in this country every year, and a big share of them start in bedrooms,” he says. “Christmas is the worst of it, and here Christmas is high summer. Windows open, fans going, curtains blowing about, people dozing off on the couch. Once you’re past sixty-five you’re a lot more likely to get hurt when it happens. That’s why aged care bans them. But it’s not just them. Plenty of rentals don’t allow an open flame either, and anyone with a cat, a dog or the grandkids running around should think twice. Something like hers gives you the part people actually want from a candle, without the part that used to get me out of bed at two in the morning.”

“Those hands have painted their last snowman”

Autumn 2026. The X-rays are read to her at a clinic in Wangaratta. Arthritis in both hands, worst at the base of the thumbs, the joints worn down by fifty years of brushes and thirty-four years of scissors, glue and other people’s paint boxes. On a good morning she can do up a cardigan. She can no longer hold a fine brush still long enough to paint a snowman’s eye.

“You can keep your hands busy,” the doctor tells her. “But the fine work is over. If you keep forcing those joints, you’ll lose what you’ve got left.”

Shelley drove down from Albury that weekend. She had asked before about her mother moving closer. This time she wasn’t asking. The house would go on the market and be sold before Christmas, and Ernie’s pine with it.

She walked out to the shed and saw the shelves of finished sets, and her father’s reading glasses still on the windowsill where the first set used to stand.

“Mum, you can’t leave these on a shelf,” she said. “Dad would hate them sitting in the dark.”

The decision got made that evening at the kitchen table with Shelley. No shop, no middleman. The candles would go straight to the people who want them.

A$79: a lit window, in a box

The idea came from Shelley. She had watched how the families at the home found the candles: one daughter telling another, a nurse mentioning them to her mum. The plan was simple. Take the sets Dulcie had already finished, box them at the workbench and send them directly to the people who want them, with nobody in between.

Not even the A$158 Shelley first wrote on the price list. Dulcie crossed that out herself and wrote A$79, a number meant to cover the candles, the casting, the paint, the box and the time it takes to pack one, with no boutique markup on top.

Dulcie agreed on one condition.

“No fancy advertising,” she says. “No sale banners. I want people to know these were made for a window that wasn’t allowed a candle. And I want them to put a finger on that flame the first night and understand that’s the whole point.”

What sets these apart from anything in the shops

The rest is deliberately plain: a switch on the bottom, nothing to assemble, nothing to set up. Three hundred and eighteen sets exist, snowmen and pinecones together. There is no restock, because there is nobody left at the workbench to paint more.

The house sells before Christmas. This is not warehouse stock. It is what one woman poured and painted by hand in a little shed in Bright, most of it before the sun came up.

“I don’t want anybody’s charity,” Dulcie says. “I want these in the windows of people who miss having a candle lit. People who’d like to turn the lamps off for an hour at Christmas without lying awake wondering if they blew everything out. People who know the difference between something made for them and something made for a shop window.”

The first owners share their stories

Word moved through the home in Wangaratta first, then through the families’ friends and neighbours, then up and down the valley. The first owners started writing in.

“The first candle she’s allowed to keep lit”

Dulcie figured she would be making them for people like Ernie, in rooms like his. What happened next caught her off guard.

Daughters buy them for mums. Sons buy them for dads who have moved somewhere smaller. Grandmothers buy a set for their own windowsill, then a second for the house with the toddler and the long curtains. Somewhere along the way the candles turned into the present people give the person they worry about most at Christmas.

It makes a certain sense. A candle in the window is one of the oldest ways a house has of saying: someone is home, come in. For a lot of people who can’t have one any more, or shouldn’t, this is the nearest thing, and likely the only candle they will be allowed to leave on.

How to get a set before the shelves are empty

What is on those shelves is everything Dulcie made in the year after Ernie. Nobody is going back to that workbench. When the last set is boxed, it is finished.

The launch price is A$79, for either the snowman family of three or a pair of Ernie’s pinecones. That is not a promotion. It is the decision of a seventy-six-year-old widow who would rather see her work in the windows of people who miss a lit candle than sitting in the dark on a workshop shelf.

Every order is checked and packed by hand, dispatched within one to two days and carries a 90-day money-back guarantee. “If it doesn’t make your window feel like somebody’s home, send it back,” Dulcie says. “But nobody has sent one back yet. Once it’s in somebody’s window, they don’t want to give it up.”

For anyone who misses a lit window at Christmas, and wants that small light back in the house before what is left is gone.

DISCLOSURE: This is a paid advertisement. The owner of this site has a material connection to the products shown on this page. Testimonials reflect individual experiences. Images are for illustration; because every set is finished by hand, the final product may vary slightly. Batteries are not included. Please review the full returns policy before ordering.