Alice and 10 Years of Modeling a Christmas Village
Often we get so much mail it is very hard to reply to everyone individually… but this email from Alice caught our attention. Alice has been modeling a Christmas village for the last 10 years and is obviously very passionate about it.
We know that a lot of our readers struggle with the electrical side of model trains and here is a perfect example of modeling that requires no electrical skills at all.
Alice kindly allowed us to share her story… This is what Alice had to say…
Hi, I’m not so much a train modeler as I am a christmas village modeler.
I started collecting 10 years ago with just a 5 house set (which is now my Daughters). The reason I started is I saw the set for sale and fell in love with it and have been adding on ever since.
The village has grown to almost 50 buildings of which at least 3 are not shown do to lack of space (need a slightly longer table). I have never put a value on my village as it is for my enjoyment factor, but if I were to count it all up it would be near to $300 – $350.
Most of the buildings were inexpensive or after Christmas bargains with the HO & N scale models costing the most. I have even gone on eBay to bid on a few rare units, (the barn and the gas station and the matchbox cars).
The only two original houses are the ice house and blacksmith which were Christmas tree ornaments that I painted on the names. I looked for telephone poles but never found the right scale to match, so I made them out of pieces of doweling and mini popsicle sticks and if you look closely the stands are the tops from medicine bottles. Hey it worked!
This year I added a few more people, more trees, some animals, and the back drop. It has always been a problem lighting each building without causing a mass of wiring under the snow and still allowing it to illuminate within the body of the layout. I’ve tried several lighting systems but this works best. I saw in a catalog a snow mat with lights attached to the bottom. It was out of my price range so I bought a set of lights that are in a grid format to use on the bushes outside the house, placed my mat over it and it’s very close to the catalog.
The village is not to scale if you notice the people and the size of the doors on the house will reveal, but I have not found any village collection that is.
I have attached some photos for you to view…
Well done Alice… it is great to see the Christmas spirit alive and well in your house.
Merry Christmas to all our readers and we wish you a happy, healthy and prosperous 2009.
Anybody else do any Christmas modeling?
We would love to hear what modeling you do for Christmas? Just use the comment box below to tell us…
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Thanks Alice for sharing… you must have a lot of fun with this… Merry Christmas
Alice, your display is awesome. I’m just starting my christmas display. I have a lot of stuff, I’ve been collecting for many years, my husband just bought me my first train set. I was born blind in my left eye and now going blind in my right eye with glacoma, I want very much to work on my display with my husband and hopefully get a lot done before I go completely blind because its something I have always wanted to do,I enjoy seeing your display thanks
Hi Alice!
I’m just joining this site.
I’m also a Villager adding a railroad. I’m an admin on website for villagers, you might want to join us at http://z13.invisionfree.com/Dedicated_To_Lemax … you’ll have to register & be accepted (we have to keep the spammers out).
Dan will be posting my inquiry, I set up a display at a local museum, 4 x 20 ft, with a number of challenges to solve.
I can tell you about some other wiring options to avoid the “spaghetti” mess.
Looking forward to conversing with you!
Mallory
Thank you for sharing you Christmas village. We have been village collecting for a few years and this year we added a train and trolley. I sacrificed our dining room table(9 feet with extensions)since we having Christmas dinner at our parents house. It setup took every inch.
It took 3 days to set everything up after Thanksgiving. We couldn’t bring ourselves to take it down till Valentines Day. We have had such great fun and our granddaughters loved it. Katie is 8 years old and could run the train and Lindsay is 2, she would squeal with excitement at the train running into our cardboard covered with snow tunnel.
Needless to say we are hooked. We have bought additional trains and our planning a permament village with three different themes.
Thank you again for sharing.
Hello Dan,
I stumbled across your website while researching book-signing venues for my novel, “Christmasville.”
“Christmasville” is the story of Mary Jane Higgins, who suspects that there is more to Christmasville than what meets the eye. What the reader discovers at the conclusion of chapter one is that Mary Jane resides on a 4 x 8 model train platform. The novel culminates in a surprise ending.
The inspiration for my novel (as well as the sequel, “Finding Christmasville,” due out next year) was my train platform, which I have assembled every weekend after Thanksgiving and dismantled around Valentines Day for the past 29 years.
I’ll be posting “rare photographs” of the fictional town of “Christmasville” on my website shortly.
Alice’s story is certainly an entertaining one – her layout looks lovely. Perhaps some day she’ll write a novel about it.
Warm Regards,
Michael Dutton
(Author of “Christmasville” and the upcoming “Finding Christmasville”)
I recently came accross your blog and have been reading along. I thought I would leave my first comment. I dont know what to say except that I have enjoyed reading. Nice blog. I will keep visiting this blog very often.
Claudia
http://lioneltrains.info