Gaudencio “Dennis” Lopez, was at his new job with the city only a couple of weeks when he was told that the department’s Christmas tree design was his responsibility.
“I guess I pulled the short straw,” he said.
And this wasn’t just an in-house Christmas tree for the office. Lopez had to come up with a design his department would put up inside Honolulu Hale where thousands of people visit every year to see the annual Honolulu City Lights displays. Some of those trees are as elaborate as New York’s 5th Avenue store windows, with moving parts and strobing lights. Talk about pressure.
Lopez, an engineer and branch chief for the city Department of Environmental Services Refuse Division (ENV), wasn’t completely out of his depth, though. Before taking the job with the city, he worked for the state Department of Transportation Airports Division, where one of his projects was to design the beautiful star compass that is in the concourse between the interisland and international terminals.
“When you have an opportunity to display something in a public space, it is a way to represent who we are as a department and who we are as a community. It’s a way to build a common connection,” he said.
He was told the theme for the Honolulu Hale tree this year was “We love our sweet island home,” and that got him thinking back to his sweet childhood home in Pearl City and the big mango tree that was outside his parents’ house. He and his brother and sister would play under that tree, swing in a hammock tied to the branches, and his father would make mango bread, mango pie and pickled mango. The big gold-colored fruit would hang from the tree like gifts.
Lopez enlisted the help of his sister Carolyn Laborte, a professional baker, to create gingerbread cookie ornaments shaped like the mangos from his childhood memories.
These were not just any old box-mix cookies. First, Lopez created the ginger powder from scratch from locally grown ginger that he dehydrated, ground, sifted and ground again.
The shape of the mango had to be just right, so he convinced his wife that he really needed to buy an industrial-grade 3-D printer for his son’s school projects. Lopez designed and fabricated a mango-shaped cookie cutter, a process that took several attempts before he was satisfied.
With his sister’s help, he learned how to air-brush frosting onto each cookie to get the mix of yellow, orange and red in a ripe mango.
Josh Nagashima, a planner for the division, jumped in to help with the project. Everyone in their department saved the cardboard sleeves from their coffee cups for months and assembled those into a garland for the tree.
“If you looked at the back side, these coffee sleeves are from all around the island — Kalapawai Market, Coffee Bean, different Starbucks — everywhere the people we work with live,” Nagashima said. The tree also features ornaments with QR codes which, when scanned on a cell phone, take you to information on things like recycling and composting.
In a hall full of heartfelt creativity and handmade glory, the eye may not be drawn to the little Christmas tree decorated with mangos, and indeed Lopez tries to point out the glittering trees from other departments to deflect a bit of the attention.
The ENV tree did not win any awards this year, and all anybody seems to want to talk about is a Baby Yoda in another department’s display, but the tree represents that other side of Christmas, the nostalgic side, the yearning for past days and the gratitude for simple gifts of family and friends and mangoes for everyone.
The mango-shaped gingerbread cookies are wired onto the tree, but if they happen to fall to the ground or if someone should, heaven forbid, steal one, Lopez decided it would be OK. That’s part of the authenticity of the tree.
That’s part of a sweet island home he loved.
Reach Lee Cataluna at 529-4315 or lcataluna@staradvertiser.com.
