On Friday, a dozen people lined up outside St. Vincent de Paul thrift store on Wellington Street prior to its 9 a.m. opening, each hoping to snag one or more items from the store’s window displays. The items were arranged in a rainbow of colour — a yellow window, a red one, pink, purple, orange, blue, brown, green and black — and, after a month on display, were finally coming out and being sold.



Zarafshan Heidari was first in line, arriving from her Pinecrest home at 4:30 a.m. to guarantee she would get the pink, orange and red purses she wanted for her daughters. It was Heidari’s third time lining up at St. Vincent’s to get something from the window display, and she well knew about the importance of showing up early.



“The last time I came, there was a pot I wanted, but I arrived too late and someone else got it.”



Behind her, Brenda Burnett had been in line since 8 a.m., spelling off her husband, John, who’d set up camp at 7 a.m. “My daughter wants the typewriter,” Brenda said of the blue portable Smith Corona selling for $25. “Hopefully it still works, but we’ll see.



“A month ago, we wanted to buy a telescope that was in the window,” she added. “There were four of them. I came at quarter-to-seven, I was fourth in line, and I did not get one.”



A couple places back, Ingrid Tenbroek was in line for a friend who couldn’t make it Friday, and was hoping to get a black metal basket for $6 and a purple MEC sleeping bag for $25. Behind her, Joa Keur had his eyes on a toaster, a blanket and a furry pillow.



“I did this once before,” he said. “I got a beautiful antique school clock.”



St. Vincent’s themed window displays — and the monthly lineups that accompany the dismantling of each — are well-known in the neighbourhood and elsewhere in Ottawa. “I used to do window displays in Toronto,” added Keur, “so I really appreciate what they do here. Their windows are really good.”





St. Vincent de Paul thrift store window dresser Calere Boudreau with some of the items that will be displayed in the shop's third annual 'Canadiana' display. Bruce Deachman/Postmedia .

Unlike other thrift stores that auction off collectibles, St. Vincent’s simply affixes prices to theirs and sells them on a first-come, first-served basis.



“We wanted to make those objects available in a way that was fair to everybody,” said Calere Boudreau, who designs the store’s window displays.

A few days earlier, Boudreau was in a back room at St. Vincent’s Merivale Road location, surrounded by some of the unwanted flotsam of thousands of lives: A wooden rocking horse destined for the Christmas window grazed quietly by her feet, a 1950s toy metal crib resting nearby. Old telephones and medieval-looking helmets and maces shared shelf space with Shriner fezzes from the 1960s, First World War-era sheet music, leather riding boots, an electric guitar, postcards, pennants, a Brownie camera, stamp albums, dolls, sunglasses and more.



The items in the room are typically rarer than most of the goods the store receives, the vintage and arcane objects that the not-for-profit charity’s sorters aren’t sure what to do with.



Boudreau, though, was looking through a large bin of items she’d collected for the window replacing the Colours one. It was for the store’s third annual Canadiana-themed display: old-school snowshoes, a Hudson’s Bay blanket, wooden loons, quilts, mukluks, a toy beaver, antlers, maple leaf placemats, a soapstone carving, a chipmunk souvenir, parkas, a onesie decorated with Mounties, a rabbit fur-trimmed Eskimo doll.



“In a lot of ways it’s like a museum,” Boudreau said of the items she sees. “A museum of unwanted, unneeded gifts, the passage of childhood, family heirlooms, a coveted item of clothing that no longer fits, the passage of fashion, a change in taste, the lost passion, the obsession of collecting, the memories objects evoke.”



Boudreau leafed through the pages of a sketchbook. For the past couple of years, she’s designed and assembled the Wellington Street store’s window displays — 10 panes, each about four feet wide. The sketchbook is a documentary of the displays she’s done, and some, like her Purse-a-Palooza idea, that never saw the light of Wellington.



Before Boudreau arrived with her degree in fine arts, St. Vincent’s windows were more of a random sampling of the store’s wares, and usually themed only for holidays — St. Patrick’s and Valentine’s Day and Halloween, and their ever-popular Christmas displays.



Boudreau took St. Vincent’s windows to new creative and thematic heights. There was one based on winter sports, another containing baseballs and bicycles. One window was designed in a tea party motif (from Alice in Wonderland, that is, not the U.S. Republican offshoot), with cups, saucers and tea settings aplenty. One winter, to help break up the gloom of the season, she filled the windows with lights and lamps of all kinds.



She’s done animal themes and science fiction motifs. Her pop culture window featured mid-century toys, Michael Jackson T-shirts and iconic books, movies, magazines, games and records. For a musical theme, Boudreau devoted one panel each to a different style of music — pop, jazz, country, folk, classical and punk, for example — with a mannequin in each displaying the fashion of each style. For Remembrance Day, they display wartime objects that are not for sale, but simply for honouring and reflection.

Over the years, the windows have attracted passersby who aren’t even interested in the merchandise beyond the esthetics of the displays. There was a time when people used to make a point of going to look at their Christmas windows; in the past few years, any of the displays merit a special trip.



“I hear many comments from people,” said Boudreau. “They love to gather and take a look and see what’s there, and they look forward to the next ones. It’s like this neighbourhood thing now.



“One lady who lives in the neighbourhood told me that she used to work for External Affairs, so she had visitors come from around the world. And she told me, ‘You know what? When they visit, I bring them to see the windows as I would to a museum in Ottawa.’”



Boudreau, in fact, treats these items as artifacts. “To me, there’s something more special about something coming from somewhere else than brand-new,” she said. “We deal in discards, and try to do it as well as possible, respecting the donors and the objects both.



“The displays,” she added, “are a way to give back to the community and show respect for the donors who give us their items. Because for a lot of people, parting with things is difficult, so it thrills me when somebody will say to me about something that is in the window, ‘That was my grandmother’s!’ or ‘This was covered in dust in the attic and now it has a starring role in the window.’ People get a real kick out of that.”



Although she can never be sure which items will catch someone’s fancy, Boudreau knows there will always be a lineup of people waiting to buy something out of her windows.



“I go every time before the store opens and ask the people in the front of the line how long they’ve been waiting. The earliest I’ve had is midnight, but 4 a.m. is not uncommon at all.”



She’s seen people in lawnchairs, knitting, working on laptops or streaming movies while they wait. She encountered two men who met in the lineup and are now fishing buddies.



“There are wonderful stories,” she said. “Sometimes people can’t make it themselves so they’ll ask a friend to go; one time there was this man getting something for a woman’s daughter’s bedroom. She couldn’t make it because she had just had surgery. And it turned out that he operated on her. He was the surgeon and he was there to get something for this woman’s room. And I said, ‘Wow. I’ve heard of doctors making house calls, but store calls?’”



bdeachman@postmedia.com