How to Build a North Pole Prop
Christmas is, no doubt, one of my favorite holidays.
I put a lot of time into planning all of the mini sessions for this year - more so than I think I ever have. The anticipation of getting to see all the sets come together and photograph them helps me get through the chaos of busy season. I love the colors, textures, and joy that come with everything Christmas.
Fact: I normally start planning everything a year in advance.
I spend hours upon hours searching through backdrop sites to find ones that match what I have in mind, then even more hours searching for the perfect props to complement each set. My Amazon wishlist gets filled, I patiently and hopefully wait for sales, and piece by piece watch things come together for months. But, when I can’t find what I’m looking for, or something is way out of budget, I usually find a way to make it.
The big project for this year was the “North Pole”
I guarantee you this will be back in some form another time after all the work that went into figuring out how to make the pole. The toughest set each year is always the one that has one of our mini horses incorporated. It has become tradition for at least one of the sets to feature them. The challenge is figuring out how to incorporate them into the set and be safely tied up, all while having it look natural within the set. Enter the North Pole idea.
After people asking for Irish to come back as a “reindeer” again for a few years now, I decided to make it happen. I had this idea for him being Santa’s “Reindeer in Training” at the North Pole. I found the perfect, fun backdrop, but needed the supporting role for my main actor, and that was the North Pole.
Shopping for & Building the North Pole
My husband and I hit up Lowe’s and scoured the aisles. In the end, I decided on PVC pipe for it’s strength (Irish wasn’t cracking it in half or pulling it out of the barn floor once we had it screwed down), along with a PVC cap fitting for the top, and yes….a toilet flange for the base. I take all the credit for the toilet flange idea, but he gets credit for assembly. You might be surprised how hard it is to find the right color of red spray paint in July….but it is. But, after a few hardware store stops, we found it, along with red and gold glitter, and headed home to start the assembly and paint.
I painted the pole white, then used painters tape to mark it off, and sprayed on the red once it was dried. It took about two cans of white and two cans of red paint to fully coat it so that none of the print showed through that was on the pipe. I put a stake into the yard to stand the pole upright on to be able to paint all the sides at one time.
That part was all a piece of cake. Figuring out how to attach the trailer tie - not so much. I needed it about halfway down the pole to put his head at the height it needed to be. In the end, I was REALLY glad I have a small hand and bought the 4” size pipe, because I was arm deep in it trying to hold a nut in place and get the trailer tie attached with it - but still falling a couple inches short of reaching (darn my big biceps!!!!). My intuitive second half rigged up an extender piece for me to balance the nut on and try to locate the tiny bit of screw that was poking through that he was holding onto from the outside. It took some work, but we did it! And yes, if you try to do this and have a big hand, you’re going to need to find some help.
The second biggest challenge was finding the sign for the pole. Who knew it was so hard to find something decent priced, and not 4” wide?!?! After a couple of failed attempts, I settled on printing a custom sign and got the 12x12 size. Once it arrived, we already had the whole nut screw thing figured out and attached the sign easily, and I completed it with fake snow drips (my personal favorite part).
In total, the build cost ended up being about $120. In comparison to some other options I saw for sale, this was about half the price…..and our version was a whole lot sturdier, plus miniature horse friendly. Without the modifications to tie him, cost would about been around $100. Just for those curious about total cost of an entire set - between the backdrop, floordrop, fake snow, presents, antlers (and spare antlers), this will set you back about $1000. Include Irish….well, that makes it priceless.
