Saturday, November 15, 2008

A Village Weekend

That past week just seemed to zoom through. Now the weekend is here and that simply means that during this time of year, the Gator family will be continuing construction of Village 2008. We hope to have our special celebration of Christmas and the Christmas season completed during the last weekend of this month.

Although we normally begin on Nov. 11th, this year the weather pushed us back to the preceding weekend so that we could use the Holiday to complete some outside activity. We would have cleaned the leaves, etc., during the preceding weekend, but rain put that off until Veteran’s Day.

Our Village consists of three sections. One is a long section resting in a two-foot area between the wall and the couch. We had a couple of pictures of the section in previous blogs. The second section depicts A Christmas Carol, the immortal story written by Charles Dickens. I’d bet there’s precious few folk who haven’t read the tale of the miserly Scrooge and how he became a reformed man or haven’t seen one of the four or five or more movie versions of the classic tale.

Through the years we’ve found that the section we’ll be putting up this weekend is the most popular for our visitors. We have many of the buildings in the story, including Scrooge’s home, Nephew Fred’s home, Belle’s home, Tiny Tim’s and Bob Cratchet’s home among them. We have the Boarding House, Scrooge and Marley’s counting house, the poultry shop, and many more.

In a park at the center of the display is Dickens himself reading his story to the passing people. We have figurines depicting the major characters and a multitude of other people who represent the citizenry. There are street vendors and musicians. Of course, there are dozens of trees dotting the landscape. We’ll drop “fresh fallen snow” throughout the display during that last weekend.

That’s the section of our overall display we’ll be recreating this weekend.

Next weekend’s last section is a conglomeration of scenes, including a woods scene, a farm, some waterfront, and a city scene. We complete our display on the final weekend. We’ll fill in empty spots with people, carts, animals, and things. And trees. Lots and lots of trees. Then comes that snow shower to give it all a pretty winter look. The crowning moment comes as we flip the switch to bring it all to life with lights, movement, and occasional sound.

We take many pictures all through the activity and I’ll show a couple of in-progress shots to you on Monday. Meanwhile, I hope you enjoy your weekend as much as we’re enjoying ours, and we’ll be back Monday morning.

GiM

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