Another one of my favorite Christmas traditions is our holiday village.  When I was a toddler, we had a vintage dime store Christmas village. (And yes, those little cardboard houses only cost a dime when they were originally purchased.) My only recollection of the village was poking my pudgy little fingers through the cellophane windows, effectively breaking them.

But in 1986, Mom decided to move onto a ceramic Christmas village with seven buildings: a town hall, school house, apothecary, fabric store, farm, general store, and church. We also had a ceramic Christmas tree my cousin Annette made, which was the Rockefeller Center tree of the town. We’d put the village in the bay window of our house, filling it with snow, trees, and little figurines ice skating, riding in a sleigh, and sledding.

Over the years, the village just kept getting bigger and bigger. We’d add buildings that reminded of places we worked or loved:  a tea shop and movie theater for my sister Alyse; a bridal shop, log cabin, and lighthouse  for Mom; and a train station and train set for me. Grandma added her own house that she picked up on a trip to CVS – a house with lots of Christmas lights that blinked to “Jingle Bells” when you played a button. (It certainly didn’t fit in with the New England feel, but everyone gets to contribute.)

Here’s the village in three parts. Parts of it are a little hard to see, but it gives you somewhat of a good idea what it looks like all lit up:

I think one of the most fun parts about the village is the memories connected to figurines and items in the village. Many have been collected from our vacations over the years, including:

• A figurine of Anne of Green Gables sitting at the train station and sand from a trip to Prince Edward Island
• A piece of redwood and a little trolley from a trip to San Francisco
• Rocks from Edinburgh Castle and Islip, England, plus a Scottish bagpiper figurine from my recent trip to the UK
• A small totem pole from our trip to Alaska
• A boat from our trip to Maine
• Seashells collected from many beaches along the Atlantic

  

  

 

That last photo there is one of the newest to the collection – a dog going through the garbage pail, just like my dog Obi, who loves going through the trash and destroying things. Peeking around the corner in the background is the mailman, who’s scared of the dog. And speaking of destroying things, here’s a photo of Obi derailing the entire train set in 2007. A few villagers died in the massacre. And her face says, “I’ll do it again!”