Crèching it Convention Centre salon goes all-out with multimedia Yuletide nativity display Intersection
By: David Sanderson Posted: 2:00 AM CST Saturday, Dec. 13, 2025

“Simply superb.”

A moment after being on the receiving end of a trim, a grey-haired gent halts on his way out of Holiday Coiffures to admire a detailed nativity scene occupying an entire wing of the RBC Convention Centre salon.

Mario Potenza, the shop’s longtime owner, shrugs off his customer’s compliment, and instead thanks him for pausing to look over the exhibit, which rests atop a series of covered banquet tables and is comprised of dozens of scale-model plastic figurines meant to depict the birth of Jesus.

Get a load of this, Potenza tells the fellow, as he flicks a switch on an in-store stereo system tuned to a local radio station broadcasting festive tunes. Suddenly, the room is alive with the sounds of cows mooing, sheep bleating and, well, whatever noise it is that camels emit.

“Well, I’ll be. You even have a soundtrack,” the customer says, shaking his head. “Again, my friend, simply wonderful.”

Potenza grew up in Potenza, a city of 64,000 in southern Italy. As far as the married father of two knows, there is no correlation between his family name and that of his birthplace. Potenza means power in Italian, while Potentia, the community’s original name, is Latin for potential, he says.

Potenza was in his late teens in the mid-1970s when he moved to Winnipeg with his parents and siblings. He couldn’t speak a lick of English when he arrived, but thanks to a part-time job at Salisbury House, he picked the language up, one order of fries-and-gravy at a time.

A talented soccer player, he was recruited to play for Lucania FC, an amateur squad founded in 1971 by Italo-Canadians. When he wasn’t flying around the pitch or toiling at Sals, he was attending Scientific Marvel Beauty School, a Portage Avenue academy that closed in 2017, after 101 years in operation.

“I was 10 years old when I started as a beauty-shop apprentice in my hometown,” he says. “In Italy, it’s common to do that instead of school. I was there for years and learned quite a bit, but I still had to get formal training here before I could go looking for a job.”

According to an advertisement in the Winnipeg Free Press, Potenza first caught on at Holiday Coiffures (one of the convention centre’s original tenants when it opened in 1975) in December 1977. Following stints at other salons in the city, he purchased Holiday Coiffures in 1981.

Potenza, a former marathoner who has raced in Boston and New York City, has always loved to paint. Examples of his work have adorned the walls of his salon for decades. The nativity scene is a direct result of how customers were reacting to his paintings.

When people are stuck in a chair for an hour or so, they appreciate having something else to look at besides the person cutting their hair, he says with a wink. Twelve years ago, with Christmas around the corner, he thought why not really give them something to stare at?

As a young lad who was raised Roman Catholic, Potenza especially enjoyed attending mass during the holiday season, when elaborate nativity scenes would be set up on the pulpit of his church.

Recalling that period of his life, he contacted his sister, who had returned to Italy years earlier, summoning her to go shopping for intricate figurines similar to what he remembered.

Pieces began arriving in the mail — a shepherd here, a wise man there — until he had enough to start assembling his first crèche.

He introduced new items the next year, again imported from Europe. Additionally, he built a mountainous backdrop out of brown wrapping paper, and added pebbles, moss and dried flower petals he collected during the summer months to portray roadways and farm fields.

By the fourth year, the nativity scene, which by then had grown to its current size — approximately 60 square feet — had become so impressive that he was approached by one of the convention centre’s managers, who was hoping to display it in a more prominent section of the downtown hub.

“They put it in the hall leading to the skywalk, behind glass,” Potenza recalls. “But because of its size, I had to do it as a double-decker, with the village on the bottom, and the manger scene, with Mary, Joseph and the baby Jesus on top.”

“Last week there was a woman who, after getting her hair done, spent 45 minutes going from corner to corner, studying the whole thing, inch by inch.”

In 2022, Potenza suffered a serious shoulder injury after taking a tumble from his bike. He says that year it was tough enough learning how to cut hair with his left hand, never mind assembling the nativity scene.

He parked the idea that December, and again in 2023 and 2024. Now fully healthy, he made the decision to reintroduce it this year, after repeatedly fielding questions from his loyal clientele as to its whereabouts.

On the last Sunday in November, he and his wife spent 90 minutes packing two vehicles to the roof with labelled boxes (“manger,” “palm trees,” “chickens”) before making the trip to his shop from their home in Linden Woods.

“Even though it had been a few years, it didn’t take that long to put up, maybe four hours,” Potenza says. “The biggest thing was moving a couple of (barber) chairs and my colouring station, to make room.”

With Christmas under two weeks away, many of Potenza’s customers — people who were overjoyed to spot the nativity scene when they dropped by for an appointment — have been telling him they fully intend to return with friends and family to view it further. He’s proud to hear it’s on many of their December to-do lists, right up there with skating at The Forks.

“Last week there was a woman who, after getting her hair done, spent 45 minutes going from corner to corner, studying the whole thing, inch by inch,” he says. “I told her I appreciated her taking the time, the same way I appreciate everybody who spends hour upon hour decorating their home with lights for the rest of us to enjoy during the holidays. To me, that’s such a beautiful thing to do.”

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