Kickstart: How's this for a holiday movie? Foam nutcrackers help rescue an Ohio town

When its final steel mill closed, foam and fiberglass helped an Ohio town recover.

The Washington Post has the story of the Steubenville Nutcracker Village, with 200 life-sized nutcrackers posed throughout town during the holiday season. Each of them are individually sculpted from foam and plastics, and painted and decorated by hand by the crew at Nelson Fine Arts and Gifts, a local business that had specialized in store fixtures and gifts prior to the nutcrackers' rise in 2015.

As Cathy Free writes in the Post, a decade after the final steel mill closed, the community had suffered and seen businesses closed, leaving empty storefronts downtown. Jerry Barilla, the owner of an appliance store, suggested festive nutcrackers to brighten up downtown during the holidays. Mark Nelson, the owner of Nelson Gifts, said his company's equipment could make them.

Nelson turned to Brodie Stutzman, a recent college graduate with a degree in biology, who had been doing small tasks for the business. As he began shaping the foam, his "hidden talents" were uncovered. Stutzman is now "master carver" for Nutcracker Village and has formed and decorated each of the pieces.

The nutcracker scheme seems to have worked, Free writes, with new businesses drawn to town thanks to the display.

The Nutcracker Village will remain open through Jan. 6.

For an example of a far smaller Christmas display using plastics, Diversified Plastics Inc. has put its 3D printing capabilities to work making intricate ornaments for each of its workers.

The employee-owned injection molder and micromolder used the Carbon DLS system within its additive manufacturing unit, termed the acceleration station, for the process.

DPI, based in Minneapolis, has about 100 employees at sites in Minnesota and California. It is a former finalist for Plastics News' Processor of the Year and has been named among the Best Places to Work in the plastics industry.

Let's take a moment to think about another key part of the holidays: food.

The polling group YouGov recently released the results of a survey of what cooking utensils are in American kitchens. It didn't break out which of those items were plastic vs. other materials, but you already know plastics are a big part of the housewares industry.

As might be expected, some mainstays like measuring cups and spoons, can openers and spatulas are in at least 90 percent of Americans' kitchens. But the survey of 1,000 people in the U.S. also inquired about some items that don't show up as much. About 65 percent of American households have no sporks on hand while 39 percent have no reusable straws.

Digging even deeper into the data, younger people are more likely to own reusable straws, with 33 percent of people from both the age 18-29 category and the 30-44 category owning between one and five reusable straws. That drops slightly for the next age group — with 32 percent of people 45-65 owning at least one straw — then falls to 26 percent for people age 65 and older.

On the flip side, measuring cups are more likely to be used frequently by those age 65 and older (72 percent) vs. those age 18-29 (38 percent).