After 31 Years in America's Silver City, Eileen Is Finishing Her Last Christmas Run by Hand

She couldn't keep the whole trade in Connecticut. She kept the part she could — and this December is the last of it.

The buffing room at Prentice Plate & Polish sounds a little like weather. Two wheels turning, a low hum off the motors, and the soft slap of a spoon being laid against the cloth and turned, and turned again, until the steel throws the ceiling light straight back at you. There is rouge dust on the windowsills, on the radio, on the back of Eileen Prentice's hands. The smell of it has been in this brick since 1946.

By four in the afternoon in October it's already going dark outside the shop windows on Butler Street, and that's where you'll find her: at the long bench under them, sixty-eight years old, reading glasses pushed up into her hair, holding a brush thinner than a pencil. She has run this shop for thirty-one years. Her father and her grandfather ran it for forty-nine before that. In front of her, six little figures dry in a row, waiting to be set — a Santa, a tree, a reindeer, a red hat, a snowman, a stocking. Behind her, stacked to the ceiling, the green boxes.

Eileen has a rule about Christmas presents. If it's eaten, burned, or spent by the second week of January, it wasn't really a gift. It was a receipt with a ribbon on it.

"Cookies, a candle, a gift card in a little envelope," she says. "I've given all three. I've gotten all three. Nobody remembers who gave them, including me."

So a few years ago she set herself a problem, the way she's set herself problems for three decades: make something a person would be glad to unwrap, actually use, and then put away in a drawer and take back out next December. Not a decoration. Not something to admire on a shelf. Something that goes on the table while the coffee is still hot.

What she came up with is a set of six — three coffee spoons and three cake forks, mirror-polished in her shop, each one topped with a different hand-painted figure. A Santa. A tree. A reindeer. A red hat. A snowman. A stocking.

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6-piece set in the green gift box

What Meriden Used to Be

They called this town the Silver City, and it wasn't a nickname somebody made up for a brochure. For most of a century, a serious share of the flatware on American tables passed through Meriden on its way to being finished. The big houses were here. So were the dozens of small shops that did the work the big houses farmed out.

Prentice Plate & Polish was one of them. Eileen's grandfather opened it in 1946, doing plating, polishing and final inspection on contract. Her father ran it after him. By the time the eighties were over, the houses they worked for had closed or moved production overseas, and most of the shops on their street were gone.

Eileen took the business over from her father in 1995. Thirty-one years ago. She kept it alive on the work that couldn't be sent anywhere else: re-plating a grandmother's wedding flatware, refinishing service for diners and hotels, and — for a little over twenty years now — her own small runs, sold at antique and craft shows across New England and online.

Where Each Part of It Happens

Eileen is precise about this, because she's spent thirty years around people who exaggerate it. She does not pour steel. Nobody in Connecticut pours steel for teaspoons anymore.

The blanks come from a mill in upstate New York, one of the last places in the country still rolling flatware stock. Everything after that happens on her benches: the mirror polish, the hand-painting of all six figures, setting each figure on its stem, the inspection, and the packing. Two women come back every summer to work the season with her. They've been doing it long enough that Eileen says she can tell whose brush did which reindeer.

Why Gold and Not Silver

This is the part that surprises people, given what the shop spent fifty years doing. Eileen chose a gold-tone finish on stainless steel, and she chose it on purpose.

"Silver plate tarnishes. That means a cloth, and a cabinet, and a person who decides it's too nice to put on the table," she says. "I've watched beautiful flatware spend forty years in a drawer liner. I didn't want to make another one of those."

The finish on these doesn't tarnish, doesn't need polishing, and goes in the dishwasher. Each piece is 6.5 inches long and a hair over half an inch wide — a proper coffee spoon and a proper cake fork, not a novelty that's too small to eat with. They have weight in the hand. That part is not an accident either; it's the one thing a flatware polisher notices first, every time.

Six Figures, Six People at the Table

The six different figures are the whole idea, and Eileen will tell you she stole it from her own kitchen. Put the set out and within about ninety seconds everyone has claimed one. The reindeer belongs to the grandson who always sits by the window. The snowman belongs to whoever got there first and is not giving it up.

Next year, the same people reach for the same ones. That's what she was after when she started: not a thing that gets opened, admired, and quietly put somewhere. A thing that turns into a small, stupid, permanent family argument about who gets the Santa.

It also solves the problem most people are actually facing in the second week of December: a daughter-in-law, a host, a neighbor, a teacher — somebody you like, who already owns everything, and who does not need another candle. It arrives in a green box with a window lid, so it's wrapped before you touch it.

Why This Is the Last One

Eileen sold the building in September. There was no one to take it over — her daughter is a physical therapist in Hartford and has never once pretended otherwise, which Eileen says she respects enormously.

The sets were prepared across the summer, the way they are every year: polish through June and July, paint and set through August, pack in September. Fourteen hundred of them. When they're gone, that's the end of it, because there's no bench left to make more on and nobody left standing at it.

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