Perhaps no other Sedona resident has the holiday spirit quite like Susan Carter. Decades before the Berlin Wall would fall, in the small town of Galesburg, Illinois, a teenage Susan wandered into a boutique and left with four Christmas ornaments handcrafted in East Germany. That innocent shopping trip sparked Susan’s Christmas ornament collection that now includes nearly 1,000 pieces from across the globe. And that number doesn’t include her collection of nutcrackers, smokers and angels. Each year, around the beginning of November, Susan begins to unpack the collection in her West Sedona home. It takes her about a month to put up all the decorations, which means it takes another month to put them all away. Her ornaments stay up, usually, throughout all of November and December. “Each one is packed in tissue and boxes, so they are all in immaculate condition,” says Susan.
Of course, when you’re amassing an international collection, it helps to be a flight attendant. Susan worked for Delta Airlines from 1970 until she retired in 2005. She flew both domestic and international routes, and each ornament in her collection brings back a memory of a specific time and place, such as the Princess Diana ornament purchased in London shortly after the princess’ death in 1997. Susan and her husband relocated from Atlanta to Sedona in 2014, but they visited Red Rock Country for the first time in 2008. That’s when Susan discovered Native American ornaments by recognized artists such as Pearl Joe and Anderson and Berna Koinva. Today, in addition to a 9-foot tree bedecked in ornaments from her travels, Susan has a smaller tree filled with ornaments from area tribes including a couple of limited edition pieces from the Heard Museum in Phoenix.
Susan still collects Native American ornaments and Swarovski snowflakes, but she hasn’t been back to Europe since 2009. (For the record, she says the Christmas market in Stuttgart, Germany, is the best of all the markets.) Just don’t ask her to choose a favorite. “They are all so beautiful,” she says.
