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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 Two Harbors, Minnesota is letting her last 318 hand-painted candle sets go, before the house is sold ahead of the first snow.

By Margit Solberg · 8 min read

Two Harbors, Minnesota. Lavonne Ekstrom, seventy-six, has painted her last snowman. On the shelves of the little workshop behind her house, the one Arvid built, with the window that looks out over the lake, 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 holiday 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 winter he was no longer allowed to.

Today Arvid Ekstrom is gone. Lavonne’s hands will not hold a brush steady anymore. And the sets on those shelves are the last she will ever make.

Lavonne 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 $59.

This is how half a century of first snows ends, and why one widow’s decision has traveled a long way past Two Harbors.

The art teacher and the man who lit every window

Lavonne Ekstrom did not grow up with snow and candles. She grew up in Mankato, the daughter of a seed salesman, and came north in 1972 to teach art at the elementary school in Two Harbors. She stayed thirty-four years. Half the town over a certain age learned to hold a paintbrush in her classroom.

Arvid Ekstrom worked for the Forest Service in the Superior National Forest. He was the kind of man who noticed the first snow before anyone else did, and he had one tradition he never once skipped.

“The night of the first real snow, he went through the house and put a candle in every window,” Lavonne says, one hand resting on a shelf of finished sets. “Every single window, even the bathroom. Then he’d come and stand next to me in the yard and look back at the house. He said 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 spring Arvid planted a white pine at the corner of the yard, a sapling no taller than his knee. That December, Lavonne painted the first family Christmas card: two snowmen in scarves at a window, a red cardinal on the sill. She painted a new one every year after that, and the snowman family grew as theirs did.

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

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

Arvid: half a century at the same window

Every year it went the same way. Arvid would come in from the yard with snow on his hat and say it’s here, Vonnie. She would put the coffee 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,” Lavonne says. “I don’t think he ever thought of them as decorations. They were how he said the house was ready.”

By their sixties, Lavonne had started blowing them out behind him. A curtain that swung too close one year. A candle she found still burning in the guest room at two in the morning. The cat, who had opinions about windowsills.

Between them they watched forty-nine first snows from that front yard. Arvid never missed one.

Then, in November 2023, he did.

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

Arvid slipped on the ice of the back steps in the second week of November 2023. The hip was repaired. The stairs in the house were not getting any easier. By Thanksgiving he had moved into a senior residence in Duluth, twenty-five miles down the shore.

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

“He never complained about the room,” Lavonne says. “He complained about the window. The first snow came that December and he called me and said, Vonnie, it’s here, and there’s nothing in the window. Almost fifty years, and now he had a smoke detector and a night-light.”

So Lavonne did what she had always done. She went out to Arvid’s old workshop behind the house 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, cardinals and all. She cast a pair of pinecones from cones off Arvid’s white 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 Arvid set them on the windowsill, switched off the lamp and called her. “He said, it’s winter 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 Hibbing. By spring Lavonne was making them, one set at a time, for families she had never met.

Arvid is gone: the workshop before dawn

February 2025. Arvid Ekstrom passed away at the residence, with the candles on in his window. He and Lavonne 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 Annika, a pharmacist in Rochester, called every evening and offered to come up and help sort the house. Lavonne told her not yet.

One morning in May, not sleeping, she pulled on Arvid’s old barn coat, walked out to his workshop at four o’clock and switched on the lamp over the bench. She propped up the last snowman painting she had done for him, the one from that final December, 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 workshop was the only place left that didn’t feel empty.”

For nearly a year Lavonne 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 Arvid 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 Arvid light candles,” Lavonne says. “Nobody lights a candle to see by. You light it so the room feels like somebody is 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. Lavonne 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 yard, it reads like a candle someone just lit.

Then there is the hand 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 to find.

Gary Halvorsen spent thirty-one years with the Duluth Fire Department. “Candles start thousands of house fires in this country every year, and a big share of them start in bedrooms,” he says. “December is the worst month. The holidays are the worst days. And once you’re past sixty-five you’re a lot more likely to get hurt when it happens. That’s why residences ban them. But it’s not just them. Plenty of apartment leases don’t allow an open flame either, and anybody with a cat, a dog or a grandkid 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”

Spring 2026. The X-rays are read to her at a clinic in Duluth. 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 button a coat. 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 have left.”

Annika drove up from Rochester 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 the first snow, and Arvid’s white pine with it.

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

“Mom, 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 Annika. No shop, no middleman. The candles would go straight to the people who want them.

$59: a lit window, in a box

The idea came from Annika. She had watched how the families at the residence found the candles: one daughter telling another, a nurse mentioning them to her mother. The plan was simple. Take the sets Lavonne 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 $118 Annika first wrote on the price list. Lavonne crossed that out herself and wrote $59, 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.

Lavonne 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 a store

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 the first snow. This is not warehouse stock. It is what one woman poured and painted by hand in a little workshop in Two Harbors, most of it before the sun came up.

“I don’t want anybody’s charity,” Lavonne 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 in December 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 residence in Duluth first, then through the families’ friends and neighbors, then along the shore. The first owners started writing in.

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

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

Daughters buy them for mothers. Sons buy them for fathers 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 in December.

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 anymore, 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 Lavonne made in the year after Arvid. Nobody is going back to that workbench. When the last set is boxed, it is finished.

The launch price is $59, for either the snowman family of three or a pair of Arvid’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, ships 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,” Lavonne 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 in December, 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 return policy before ordering.