Department 56 North Pole Village

Collecting a collections is one thing. Knowing when to stop is another.

When I met my husband he had three pieces of Department 56’s North Pole Village. Within ten years that number was ten times larger. It has been quite a few years since we’ve purchased any new items from the collection, but this isn’t very surprising considering the quality reduction, mass production attitude the company acquired. However, the older pieces still retain their original hand painted charm. Although, I will admit, we do have a few pieces that I would consider hybrid pieces with a little commercialism. I decided to set them up in an area that shows Santa’s expansion into the commercial market.

Today, sadly, the pieces are mostly plastic and mechanically painted instead of hand painted ceramic and the offshoot villages, Elf Land and North Pole Woods, just aren’t up to par with their predecessor. We do have a few pieces from these villages, but only one that we purchased, Rudolph Ring Toss.

The hardest part about putting up the village was trying to put out everything I wanted to put out. I kept trying to find a way to put a shelf between the two towers in our living room and when that was obviously not going to work I simply put a shelf on top of them. Duh. There are still a couple pieces I would have liked to display, but ran out of room. Oh well, maybe another year.

Halloween Decorations

We’ve started putting out our Halloween decorations. It’s hard to believe just how little we have left.

The other night we decided to dig out the Halloween stuff from the garage and start decorating the house. I always thought that we had quite a bit of stuff, but since we moved a good third of it was left behind either as garbage or garage sale fodder. That includes all of our costumes. Yes, I’m shedding a tear as I write this in mourning of all the lost costumes and wigs. I don’t know why I let myself believe I’d never want to see them again, but now that it is closer to Halloween I realize the error of my ways!

Anyway, back to decorations. The inside stuff was always pretty limited. However, we had enough to make it feel like Halloween was upon us. Now it just feels like, meh, there it is. Sad. I don’t know if that means I should be on the lookout for more stuff, which isn’t really an option, or if I should instead find other ways to make the house more Halloweenie. I do know, however, our current display is quite lacking.

Thinking About Halloween

Halloween is going to be different this year. Being in another house is just one reason.

With October just around the corner, it’s time to start planning for Halloween. Of course, we left most of our Halloween decorations at the old house which in turn meant that they were cleaned out ten days before we were told to have everything out so I don’t know exactly what we have left. Bitter? No. Okay, maybe a little. Bastards. Anyway, it is time to go through what we have and figure out if we’re going to decorate or not.

Part of me is all for decorating, as we’re in a new neighborhood with lots of kids, but another part is thinking it might be overkill given our financial situation. I don’t want to have a bunch of decorations out in the yard and then have to leave the lights off because we can’t afford candy to pass out. And being in a neighborhood versus a busy street without sidewalks or streetlights means more Trick-or-Treaters which means more candy which means more money we don’t have in the first place.

And so the dilemma continues. Do we man up and decorate for our favorite holiday (even though there is nothing holy about it) or do we pretend to be hermits and ignore it? Alas, a most difficult decision indeed.

Christmas Season

Many people take down their Christmas decorations the day after the holiday. Personally we keep ours out until Epiphany.

I was shocked at how many people had already packed away Christmas by the morning of the 26th when I logged onto my Facebook account. Yes, Christmas Day is over, but the twelve days of Christmas are still in full swing until January 6th. Alas, many people are ready for the holiday to be over with and to get back to their regular lives.

Epiphany is the day we celebrate the Magi visiting the baby Jesus, and is usually seen as the end of the Nativity story, thusly, the end of Christmas. So, for those of you who haven’t yet put away all of your decorations or taken down the tree, why not leave them up for a little while longer? If for no other reason, it’s an excuse to procrastinate putting everything away.

Tree Skirts

Okay, so here’s the situation, we have a tree skirt under our artificial Christmas Tree. I think the only reason it is there is so it doesn’t look so naked with the lack of presents we have under the tree.

I’m not certain exactly when the tree skirt became part of the Christmas décor in its current form, but according to Wikipedia its original purpose was to catch the wax drippings from the candles on the tree. The skirt, however, didn’t disappear after electric lights were strung up on the tree replacing candles, but became more ornate and elaborate rather than utilitarian. I guess it is a way to dress up ass end of the tree before presents start getting piled under it. However, for our past few Christmases, it has been a prominent feature as there haven’t been many gifts.

This isn’t to say that I’m complaining about our tree skirt being such a prominent part of our décor because I like looking at it, but at times it seems a constant reminder that we’re poor. I mean, the only two present we have under the tree we got back in August or September for my nephew’s birthday we never got to give him because his birthday party was cancelled, so instead we’re giving one to him and the other to his brother.

Anyway, so while I’d love to have a full display of gifts to give to people under the Christmas tree, it just isn’t going to happen. Especially after taking in one of our cars to the shop to make sure it would be safe to drive to Idaho and then needing to have $1100 worth of repairs (brakes, tires and a mystery repair which we had to have it towed back to the shop because it apparently whirred really loud and died on the onramp to the highway) which wiped out our account. Of course, one way of looking at it is that we wouldn’t have that money if the bank hadn’t decided to foreclose on us meaning that we don’t have to pay them anymore. I guess we’ll just have to enjoy our Christmas tree skirt instead of presents. Perhaps I need to wrap some empty boxes again this year and put those under the tree? What? You’ve never done that?

North Pole Village

For as long as I’ve known my partner he has had pieces for Department 56’s North Pole Village. I finally convinced him we needed to put them out this year.

 

While we haven’t added to the collection in some years now as the newer pieces lack the charm and hand painted characteristics of the older ones, we do have quite an impressive village. I remember one year, because it was so large, we decided to try to display them all together on a long table. The problem with that was that they all got lost in one another and you were unable to appreciate them. The next year I made inserts for our multimedia towers’s top two cubbies out of blue and white poster board and hand stamped falling snow onto the dark blue to create a wintery background, which we used for a couple years before storing away. The last time we had any pieces displayed was in 2006, and at that was only seven buildings.

And so with all the crap coming down in our household this Christmastime, I felt, after spouting that I was cancelling Christmas because of my Scrooge-like, bah-humbug attitude, that I didn’t want our last Christmas in this house to be a bad one. So I decorated the tree and house and made the suggestion (not so subtly on this blog) that I would convince my partner we should put out the North Pole Village. After it was all set up, he’s glad I did.

Halloween: The Day After

With Halloween and trick-or-treaters behind us, the day after is here, which means clean up time. I know what I’ll be doing after work tonight.

It never ceases to amaze me just how many trick-or-treaters we get, especially living on a busy road with no sidewalks or streetlights. This year the count was 27, with surprisingly less than half teenagers, our usual candy grabbers. Of course, we had to take the dog we’ve been watching, Otto, back to his family at 9 o’clock that night, so we left a box with the rest of the candy on the front porch and by the time we got home both the box and the candy had disappeared. Not surprising, but I suspect teenagers had something to do with it since the box went missing too. Good thing my partner transferred the candy to it instead of leaving our Halloween candy bowl!

So before the trick-or-treaters arrived I made sure that all of the electronics and lights were in working order, which they were. I suppose it should come as no surprise that our “greeter” a talking ghoul I hung next to the front door, decided to stop working properly right before any trick-or-treaters arrived. Also not surprising was that the pumpkin lights went out too, again, right before anyone showed up. Oh well, they served a purpose, they just weren’t serving the purpose I had originally intended.

And now with it being November already the decorations need to all come down and be packed away until next year. It’s sad, yes, but then there is always the following year to look forward to. Perhaps then I’ll figure out why our “greeter” only works during the day, especially since it is a Halloween decorations and most Halloween stuff is done during the night.

Halloween!

With Halloween tonight, it’s time to put out the last of the decorations and fill the candy bowl with goodies for Trick-or-Treaters. Hopefully it won’t be pouring down rain like it was last night.

So last night’s adventure in the pouring rain was, to say the least, rushed, as we had to get home after the play, figure out costumes to wear, and then meet friends at the Edgefield McMenamins. My partner decided to go as Milton from the movie Office Space and I went as a costume a first wore when I was 18, a Literal Interpretation of a Split Personality. Sorry, I didn’t take pictures, but I’m hoping that our friend Laura will post some on her Facebook page sometime today, in which case I’ll steal them and add them to this post later.

One thing about keeping old costumes around is being able to pick and choose from something in case you don’t come up with anything new or simply are unable to locate the fabric required to make the costume authentic. The latter was certainly the case for my partner, who wanted to make a tunic and toga to wear like the Newsreader from the HBO series, Rome. The tapestry-like fabrics, usually made from wool, are incredibly difficult to find, even at a certain fabric store in Portland with an acre and a half of fabric to choose from. So instead of simply settling for curtain and drape material, he opted to figure out another costume, and since Milton really isn’t much of a stretch for him, and he already has the famous red Swingline stapler, it was a costume he could throw together in a couple minutes. Same thing with my Literal Interpretation of a Split Personality, which really only required me to rat out and spray one half of my hair and put on a bit of lipstick and eyeliner on that side too.

Keeping costumes fairly simple is the best way to not make such a big deal out of the whole matter. After all, Halloween is supposed to be fun, not stressful, and if you are spending all your energy into pulling off the perfect costume, you probably will end up having no fun at all. However, the one thing I really don’t understand when it comes to costumes recently, and this is quite the disturbing trend, is to turn every possible occupation or persona into a sexy version, especially for women and little girls. I understand wanting to be pretty, hence princesses and fairies, but why in the world would a costume maker design a sexy nurse costume for a 6 year old? As much as I absolutely love Halloween, there are times that I find certain trends to be not only disgusting, but downright wrong.

But since this is a fun holiday (although, not so holy) my plans today are to get out the rest of the Halloween decorations for outside. I’ve also got to set up the fog machine, strobe light, black lights to cast an eerie glow onto the tombstones and bone yard, and make the front porch as festive as we can with what we have. My only regret is not getting pumpkins to carve this year. Perhaps I should take the small jack-o-lantern out of the pathetic pumpkin patch we have in our backyard, the only jack-o-lantern that grew, and go ahead and carve it.