For Nicholas Tanis, A Decade Of Snowflakes, Holiday Cheer & Reminding People To Stop And Smell The Pine

Many thanks to neighbor Nicholas Tanis for sending us these photos of the beautiful holiday window displays at Almac Hardware (2 Newkirk Plaza), which he has been designing for the past 10 years.

Nicholas, who works part-time at Almac, told us that this year’s theme is based on the holiday tune “Let It Snow! Let It Snow! Let It Snow!” as “what kid does not love a snow-piled Christmas holiday!”

For the display, more than 250 hand-cut snowflakes are applied to the glass windows, and Nicholas said that, “with the setting winter sun every afternoon, a tromp l’oeil effect is created, making the entire window seem like one big snow globe.”

Nicholas – who has a long history in what he called visual merchandising, with some of the retailers he’s worked for including Saks Fifth Avenue, R.H. Macy & Co., Restoration Hardware, and Tiffany & Co. – always dedicates the Almac window to his goddaughter, Nichole, who he said, “as a young child always enjoyed watching me inside the window, as I dressed it.”

“It is with that same spirit that the holiday window is executed year after year,” he wrote.

In addition to the Almac display, Nicholas, for the first time ever, designed LoDuca’s (14 Newkirk Plaza) window – where he said that he “took the concept of snowflakes and the traditional red/green/white colors of Christmas, as well as that of the Italian flag, and translated the white plastic forks in creating floating snowflake plates over a Christmas tree of pizza boxes landscaped by evergreen Schweppes ginger ale soda cans with white straws.”

“I went with the concept of everyone loves a ‘pizza Christmas tree trimming party,’ with lots to eat and drink, and making merry in a more contemporary atmosphere and sensibility,” Nicholas wrote to us.

“I am glad to be able to bring my Fifth Avenue window displays to Newkirk Plaza in Brooklyn, which is in all actuality one of the nation’s oldest, if not first, shopping mall plazas,” Nicholas continued. (Newkirk Plaza is indeed the oldest open-air shopping mall in the country and opened on August 23, 1907. You can check out more about the plaza’s fascinating history here.)

In addition to the window displays, Almac also has its traditional tree lot, located just outside the shop, where “the scent of fresh pine fills the air, as fresh cut Canadian evergreens and wreaths are for sale until Christmas Eve,” Nicholas said.

Now that the hard work of putting the window displays together is over, Nicholas can, once again, sit back and watch as neighbors take a moment from their busy days to admire something he has worked so hard on, for so many years.

“Sometimes, when I sit on a bench at the plaza to enjoy a hot cup of coffee al fresco, I enjoy watching people stop and look,” Nicholas said. “However, most all of the time it is the children who always look, as most of the adults are too preoccupied, busily dashing back and forth from the subway station nearby. Making them stop in their tracks is a great feeling, and hopefully I have brought back some childhood memory that makes for a truly happy holiday season for them.”