James Pierson, artistic director of the Saint Cecilia Flower Festival, as florists and Cathedral Flower Guild volunteers ready Saint Cecilia Cathedral for the Saint Cecilia Flower Festival taking place this weekend in Omaha.
The St. Cecilia Cathedral Flower Festival will blossom Saturday and Sunday in abundant color and aroma, bringing its annual antidote to Omaha's winter blahs.
Florists and St. Cecilia Cathedral Flower Guild volunteers have been busy as bees in a summer garden this week creating elaborate displays to chase those blahs away. Carol and Jim Wakin have had a prime perch to observe it all coming together as they arranged flowers around a statue near the altar.
"When I came into the cathedral this morning, you could smell all the flowers and, oh, it was just magic," Carol Wakin said amid the buzz one morning this week.
"It smells like spring in the winter," Jim Wakin said.
And it looks like splendor.
About 30 florists have designed and constructed displays around many of the religious and architectural features throughout St. Cecilia Cathedral, 40th and Burt Streets. Original sculptures by local artists will be interspersed with the floral arrangements. There will be musical performances.
The show is open to the public from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Saturday and noon to 5 p.m. Sunday. Admission is free, though donations will be accepted.
There's also a ticketed event Friday night, the Candlelight Preview, at which people see the show early and attend a dessert reception. It's scheduled for 7 to 9 p.m. Tickets are $30 to see the flowers and attend the reception, or $10 for just the flowers. For tickets, people can call Cathedral Arts Project at 402-551-4888.
The Cathedral Arts Project sponsors the festival. The theme of this, the 40th annual, event is "Let There Be Light."
"It's all about light," said James Pierson, festival director and curator. "It's kind of loosely exploring all the different kinds of light."
The festival showcases the cathedral, he said. It's meant to appeal to the churched and unchurched alike. History shows that it does. Thousands of people attend the event each year. Pierson expects about 10,000 this year.
A massive disc above a gazebo in the center of the nave represents the sun on one side and the moon on the other.
"All the big things in the aisles and everything will be yellow and red on one side; that will be sunlight," Pierson said. "The other side will be the moon, so that's mostly blues, and that will be reflected in the candelabras."
Lauritzen Gardens is creating a moon garden in the north entryway to the cathedral.
The Cathedral Flower Guild does the displays in the center and the altar areas. Professional designers from local businesses make their creations in individual spaces around the cathedral in various interpretations of the theme. This year, that means exploring a range of aesthetic, symbolic and spiritual responses to the visible and conceptual aspects of light.
Carol and Jim Wakin made their arrangement around the Infant of Prague, a statue of Jesus as a child. Candles rise on one side of statues, above flowers flowing to the floor and around.
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"This is the light," Carol said, motioning to the candles as Jim snipped stems and she placed the blooms. "And then the flowers go from the oranges to the yellows to the pinks to the white hydrangeas."
"A sunrise," Jim Wakin said.
Carol Wakin, a Cathedral Arts Projects supporter who's an avid home gardener, is not a professional florist. She first got involved through her friendship with the organization's president, Judy Kennedy. This is the Wakins' third year to make a display.
What draws them to it?
"I guess a love of flowers," Carol Wakin said. "A love of community. Taking something organic and representing something holy that belongs to the Church. And it's a well-known, established project for the community."
Beyond the other side of the altar, near a statue of St. Jude, florist Lisa Mueller and her team assembled a walk-through display intended to be a story about light that people experience in their own way as they walk through it.
"Our space is a light of hope, because we have St. Jude, the patron saint of hopeless causes," Mueller said. "It'll be kind of like 'The Wizard of Oz' where it goes from black and white into color."
People will enter through a black iron gate, pass between bare-branched trees and emerge in a rainbow of flowers suspended from umbrellas strung overhead. The path will be lined with "puddles" made of flowers.
"It will be kind of like going through an early spring thunderstorm," said Mueller, a flight attendant who works seasonally at Janousek Florist & Greenhouse. "Coming out of a dark, stormy time you have a rainbow. Each one of these umbrellas will be one of the colors of the rainbow, so red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple."
Flowers will appear to rain off the umbrellas into puddles of blooms below.
As she spoke, her nephew, Kelly Brennan, and her aunt, Kathi Mueller, fashioned the puddles from carnations, roses and hypericum berries. For the three of them, being part of the flower festival this year is an especially personal labor of love, lifting their own spirits as well as those of the people who see it.
"We just lost my dad -- Kelly's grandpa and Kathi's brother -- this past year," Lisa Mueller said. "So it's nice to have a happy thing to kind of focus on. We wanted to do one that makes people happy, that makes them smile to look at the flowers. But also we wanted to do one where you become part of it."
The festival will also recognize three honorees this year: Monsignor James Gilg; Cathedral Arts Projects board members K.C. Halpine and Ron Rubin; and Brother William Woeger, the founder of Cathedral Arts Project and the flower festival, who died in December.
Meanwhile as the show approached, the aptly named florist SophiaRose Brown and co-worker Rebecca West raised a curving spray of greenery around a sculpture of St. Joseph and Jesus just inside the main front doors to the cathedral. They work for Fresh Floral, a social enterprise whose profits go to Heart Ministry Center in North Omaha.
They're employing candles and spotlights for lights. They wove peach and white flowers in their greenery that echoes the stone arch inset around the sculpture.
Brown said she appreciates the festival and the opportunity to be part of it. For those coming, she said, she hopes they will feel joy and "just appreciate the art and the time that it took, and just find beauty."
Photos: Florists and volunteers ready Saint Cecilia Cathedral for flower festival