Judy Mortensen will tell you she’s not artistic.

She’ll say that the nearly 40 characters she’s crafted out of plywood are simple replicas, and that all she’s done is trace a store-bought design. The only skill necessary, she will say, is knowing how to paint.

But as anyone driving along Sedgwick Road can see, Mortensen is just being modest.

Since the mid-1970s, Mortensen has crafted plywood cutouts of camels, elves, snowmen, Santa Claus, a little drummer boy and all sorts of other Christmas figures, displayed in spotlight-illuminated scenes on her yard. And though she didn’t come up with the design of the pieces, she has made them uniquely her own.

“I can’t draw, really,” Mortensen said, sitting inside her home in the 5800 block of Sedgwick Road. “So I did as best as I could.”

The designs for most of the Nativity scene cutouts lined up on her lot were originally purchased by Mortensen’s parents about 35 years ago, she said. Bought as colored sheets of plastic, they were meant to be glued over the top of plywood, not painted directly on. This worked well for a couple years, she said, but the paint on the plastic sheets blurred and the lines faded, taking the charm away from the Christmas pieces.

“My dad asked me if I could paint some new ones,” she said.

She transcribed the details from the plastic sheets onto plywood replicas her dad had made. She copied carefully, and painted slowly, taking about two years to complete the transcription of the original 16 or so pieces in the Nativity scene.

“It took some time,” she said. “I went along as I felt like doing it.”

Mortensen and her husband, Terry, have been arranging the scenes on their lot since 1975. Every year except one since then, they take a day around Thanksgiving to set up the Nativity scene, as well as a separate North Pole scene she constructed later on.

“I’ve added a baby camel, added shepherds, and an angel and a couple sheep,” she said.

Though she has added to her collection over the years, she said, the spirit is much the same. Different than the store-bought, elaborate inflatable decorations that many people put up around the holiday season, the scenes in her yard are her contribution to a fun season, Mortensen said.

“I enjoy all the decorations around,” she said. “I think it’s nice, people who take time to put up lights. It cheers a person up so much to see them.”

Of the 34 pieces plus numerous candy cane cutouts she and her husband display on their property, she likes some more than others. She took special time to paint the Santa Claus, she said, using the names of her children’s friends to make up the Christmas list he checks.

Her favorite is the cutout of Jesus resting in his cradle. The baby Jesus set in front of a plywood hut has seen his fair share of trials. When she first transcribed the figure from the store-bought sheet onto the plywood, she accidentally added a sixth finger on one of his hands.

“My daughter came in the room and said, ‘Mom, you know you painted six fingers, right,’” she said.

Mortensen kept the six-fingered baby prophet out on her yard for years, but sometime in the 1980s, somebody stole the cutout. She has since made a new Jesus, and she looks back on the theft with a smile.

“Why someone would steal a six-fingered baby Jesus from the yard, I just don’t know,” she said.

Mortensen plans to keep putting the scenes up in her yard every year. It gets harder and harder to spend a usually cold November day setting up the decorations, she said, but the reward is worth the work.

“A lot of people drive by and honk,” she said. “I feel good being able to do this for people.”