Christmas Fantasies

When I was a young boy, my brother Chris and I would lie underneath the Christmas tree and look up at all the lights. The moment was hypnotizing. My imagination stirred. Sugar Plums danced. You get the idea.


I think that so much of what makes the Christmas season so magical is its ablility to hypnotize. Light displays out by the lake. Christmas parades. Shopping in small, specialty local stores that love to decorate for the season. Darkness coming early. Christmas hymns on the radio. Egg nog and feasting. Midnight Mass. There's obviously a lot more to the Christmas season, but the point is that it's addictive, like a drug. I tend to take my first hit somewhere around October when I break out the Charlie Brown Christmas CD. By Thanksgiving, I am exploding.

My newest Christmas addiction has been my fantasy village. Dept 56 is awesome.

http://www.department56.com/index.aspx

I remember staring enchantedly through a store window at winter landscapes: lighted buildings, meandering creeks, porcelin boys on snowy hills, bundled in coats building snowmen. The romanticized scene appealed to me and even molded my young mind. I rather think it affected all aspects of my life. To this day I can't look out my living room window at snow falling without succumbing to the urge to be out in it. I even use the excuse that the driveway needs shoveled--anything to get outside.

So a few years ago my wife's great aunt mailed me Pine Point Pond with three skaters. Immediately I started building around it. First there came Loon Lake Cabin, which was in the Snow Village series, not matching my first piece. I bought another piece, a bed and breakfast with a horse-drawn sled from the Dickens Village collection that better matched it. Complete with a fluffy white blanket for a bed of snow, my humble little village adorned the top of my entertainment center and made me smile.

Last year the collection grew. My intention was to add one piece per year, but I am far too impatient for that, so I picked up a few new buildings, one, a boarding house, from the Snow Village series, and a few sections of a mountain creek, complete with a bridge. The Snow Village pieces went to school and are on the table behind my desk.

The other pieces again went to the top of my entertainment center.

This year I was granted permission to take over the dining room table. More river was added, a cabin, a church, and more figures, one a fly fisherman casting in my little creek, one a wood chopper, and another drilling through some ice. I created mountains out of styrofoam for the cabin, with valleys for the river. I received a couple of seaside pieces, so I then created an ocean front out of a clear plastic flourescent lighting cover and "Deep Sea Blue" paint. Countless hours have gone into many other details that I won't bore you with until the village looked fairly professional.

All of this has been a labor of love, but there's an irony behind it:

I haven't sat down to stare at it yet.  I need to fix that.