How I Got started

My love of Christmas villages started when I would help decorate my Grandma Rosie's house.  She had a set of old small cardboard houses and we would set them up.  It was pretty exciting for the kids because we put them on the wooden valances over the windows, so we got to use a ladder!  There weren't any lights involved since this was the 60's and miniature lights weren't around yet.  I've just recently learned that these were probably called Putz houses.

When I got married I got a set of small ceramic houses, then for Christmas, my husband got me a big ceramic church.  I had no idea at the time that there was anything "collectible" about it. The next year I got an Inn, and the year after that I got an even bigger church.

Flash forward a few years...my mom and I discover that what I have are Department 56 Snow Village pieces!  My mom starts her own collection, and we get serious about tracking down more of them.  We discover that a department store has them every Christmas and puts them on sale half price the day after Christmas. We would stand outside in the cold waiting for the doors to open, then race upstairs to grab as many as we could.  When my kids got a little older they would go with us and since they were faster they would get up there and start making a pile for us to go through.  (Yes we exploited our 8 year old kids!) Many of them didn't have boxes but since we weren't really interested in them as collectibles we didn't care.  Pretty soon I had a bunch of stuff.  I had to stop because I just don't have the space to store it.  



I have all these boxes in a large upstairs closet, and there is just NO MORE ROOM!