Is there any item of apparel more personal than shoes? No — not gloves, not hats, not even lingerie. To walk in another’s shoes means to live, or at least to understand, another’s life. The most moving room in any of the Holocaust museums, to my mind, is the one in Washington where you look down several feet below and find a multitude of shoes, all shapes and sizes, stitching and fashions, signifying thousands upon thousands of feet that faithfully bore the burden of bodies and souls until they could no longer, until they were ripped away and tossed upon the scrap heap of history both ghastly and grotesque. Still, they bear witness.

A livelier, and certainly less disturbing, display of the shoes of seven centuries can be found on a gleaming white tree in the townhouse of Wendy and Michael Jenkins. Everything is there — buttons, buckles, bows — in a dazzling assemblage of feminine adornment, collected and sold by the Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and sent to Wendy Jenkins by Marsha Brooks, an entertainment lawyer who has worked with Michael in countless productions ranging from Broadway to his home base at Dallas Summer Musicals. Every year around December 1 they come, by FedEx, a dozen shoes or so, each about four inches long and dangling from a string, in Ziploc bags. (Never has a single one been damaged.) Every year, Wendy, ever creative, crowds them onto a tree that contains by now close to 200, including a masterwork by Alexander McQueen. This year she plans to take the heels of some of her own shoes and make them into a star to preside on top. Michael explains that this is one of four trees at the House of Jenkins: a “normal” one dressed in crystal decorations; another festooned with the costume jewelry of Michael’s late mother, put together by Wendy; a Mickey Mouse tree, since MM is the mascot of the Michael Jenkins household that features many artful trophies from his long association with Walt Disney; and, of course, all those shoes that set our feet a-dancing.

It is a happy house. Two of the six Tonys won by shows Michael helped produce in New York are in his office at home. Also an Olivier, won in London, and a Drama Desk award. Playbills from the Dallas Summer Musicals line the stairway. Luggage is always at the ready in a downstairs closet. The night I was there, Michael was looking ahead to the next morning, when he would fly to Chicago to catch a production of a new play, Amazing Grace, in which he might invest. Wendy would be off to New York and lunch with Marsha Brooks, giver of the shoes. Then the Jenkinses would return to Dallas to look after Leisure and Recreation Concepts, their consulting, management and design company headquartered in north Oak Cliff. Currently, in addition to DSM at Fair Park, they’re pursuing a plethora of projects, from a redo of Union Train Station in St. Louis, transforming it from a rundown mall to a renewed site of excitement; to St. James Island in the Caribbean, which needs a master plan near the dock; and to Homestead, Florida, where they hope to create something distinctive, like the needle in Seattle.

But in December, out again will come the trees, bringing with them remembered love, forgotten wonder, the style of ages and facsimiles of lives long lost yet somehow found in the mystery of the season.

LEE CULLUM is the host of CEO, a series of interviews with business leaders on KERA-TV, and a contributing columnist to The Dallas Morning News. She has been a regular commentator on the PBS NewsHour and National Public Radio’s All Things Considered.