What happened to BMO’s holiday display? Those whimsical vignettes – like a candy factory or a holiday town, adorned with stuffed animals carrying out tasks – appeared every season in the bank’s Downtown lobby for 50 years until fading into history, seemingly forever.
The mechanical displays took root in 1972 when M&I Bank, which merged with BMO in 2011, acquired 30 life-size animals produced by world-renowned German toymaker Steiff, which made the original teddy bear in 1903. The collection steadily grew to more than 150 before BMO quietly ended the tradition after 2022, leaving the fate of the animals and the displays a mystery.
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So where is the BMO holiday display now? All Hands Boatworks, a Walker’s Point youth development organization, had possession of it for a time. An employee stumbled upon the seemingly discarded and shrink-wrapped smaller Steiff stuffed animals and accompanying mechanical displays at a warehouse and rescued them.
“The hope was always that we would find them a permanent home,” says Patrick McBriarty, director of special projects at All Hands, which exhibited one of the displays at its space during an open house last holiday season.
That home became German Fest. The festival’s nonprofit took in the displays in May after a board member learned of their plight.
“We had a couple groups reach out to us showing some interest in taking on the displays. The German Fest group felt that it might be something that fit well with their organization. They had the storage space and the ability to display them at different times,” McBriarty said. “There was another group out of Ohio that collects a variety of Christmas displays that’s more like a museum and they charge admission. That didn’t feel quite right.”
One display of a holiday neighborhood appeared at German Fest in July, after hours were spent brushing it clean of dust and dirt accumulated in storage. Other displays are being restored – faded colors spruced up, worn-out clothing replaced – and could become part of a public holiday setup at German Fest’s Menomonee Falls headquarters one day.
“I’m very nostalgic, so this is so cool,” says culture director Cindy Regenfuss. “I’ll keep anything that has history and a story behind it.”
Regenfuss said it took three truckloads to move the displays from All Hands Boatworks to German Fest’s warehouse.
“It was quite an undertaking. It was all day. Lots of crews of people helping us out,” she said. “Everyone at German Fest is excited about it.”
German Fest took custody of the holiday displays about two months before German Fest, the annual lakeside cultural festival at Henry Maier Festival Park held in July,
“At the minimum, we wanted to get a display piece up and working so that we could have it at German Fest and let everyone in the community know that we had the mechanical displays,” Regenfuss said. “Going forward, if anybody is looking to help, we’d love that, especially if it’s someone who has worked on the displays in the past and can give us some guidance.”
Individual mechanical displays are expected to be exhibited at future German Fest celebrations.
“We’ll likely have pieces down there every year,” Regenfuss said. “We could not possibly take everything down there all at once. We’re going to have to pick and choose.”
BMO management said changes to the lobby of its Downtown tower eliminated space needed for the displays, prompting the end of the long-standing tradition. Instead, BMO shifted its holiday focus in Milwaukee to a “significant” five-year sponsorship, which began in 2023, of the Milwaukee Ballet’s holiday performance of The Nutcracker.
BMO employees were given the opportunity to take some of the bigger pieces of the holiday displays home with them, mainly the life-size stuffed animals, when the company decided it was ending the tradition.
Regenfuss is making an appeal to those who have those pieces.
“We’d love to make the displays whole again here and there,” she said. “We’ll protect everything and if at some point in time they’d want to get rid of the pieces, we hope they’d consider us as a place to donate them so they live on.”
And the story doesn’t end there – Regenfuss says they’re reaching out to Steiff to add more to the menagerie.
