Shrunken Treasures : Tiny Christmas Village in Valley Household Looms Large on National Scale
Their Christmas displays are inside the house, not outside.
Here, you don’t find lights and reindeer, but entire fantasy worlds, miniature villages from distant times and places--tiny children hurrying about in Dickens’ London, skaters on frozen ponds outside Alpine chalets and a snow-covered cemetery with thumbnail-sized tombstones, some etched with the names of family pets.
One such fantasy land has taken over Chris and Mary Carnes’ Eagle Rock home: The 125-square-foot display has six “villages” with 97 houses and stores, five trains and a Ferris wheel, all starting modestly under the tree in the living room, then exploding nearly wall-to-wall in the raised dining area, the levels connected by a 20-foot tramway.
Jon Menick’s passion, on the other hand, is in detail: He shrunk down authentic 1920s theater posters to decorate his tiny subway station, where riders wait for trains that whisk them by a hillside into which he “planted” hundreds of snow-capped trees.
Once merely a manageable holiday tradition, the creation of village scenes in the last decade has grown into an all-out mania in households across the nation.
The Minnesota company that dominates the market in the porcelain houses and whimsical 2 1/2-inch inhabitants now records an estimated $120 million in annual sales. There are clubs, conventions and computer networks of fanatic collectors who drive up the price of some pieces, which sold for $40 just a few years ago, to $6,000. “Village Addicts Anonymous” is the name one Southern California society has given itself, testimony to an obsession that even the afflicted have difficulty understanding.
An outsider might guess it to be a heartland hobby, another venture in nostalgia for the Norman Rockwell set. But when a Louisiana aficionado staged a contest this year to find the best displays in America, the two top entries came from the Los Angeles area, both within the most faceless of homes: the plain stucco townhouse of the Carnes and the Santa Clarita Valley tract house of Menick.
“I don’t fantasize as much as some,” Chris Carnes said, gazing out at the display he and his wife start planning a year in advance. “But with all the tiny people, the tiny villages, the street lights--it is pretty easy to see yourself down there among them, living in some forgotten era.”
Village scenes under Christmas trees are nothing new, of course, extensions of Nativity displays. In the 1920s, holiday mail-order catalogues included five-inch wooden houses from Germany and paper buildings--churches, log cabins and the like--from Japan. By the 1940s, Montgomery Ward was selling eight-piece, U. S.-made cardboard villages for 69 cents.
The current rage can be traced to a fortuitous business decision of Minnesota-based Bachman’s, a large flower and plant dealer. The company was already importing ceramic flower pots from Taiwan when a buyer noticed lighted, hand-painted porcelain houses being sold there. A small first line, the “Snow Village,” was offered in 1976 by the firm’s Department 56.
A series of “villages” have been added since and, defying the national economic slump, Department 56 this summer opened a new corporate headquarters outside Minneapolis, complete with an 11,000-square-foot showroom.
“It’s a phenomenon,” said Allen Drucker, owner of the Los Angeles area’s best-known model train business, Allied Model Trains, whose Culver City store--designed like old Union Station--began stocking the villages this year.
Though exposed all his life to train hobbyists, Drucker found “this frenzy of collectors” like none he’d ever seen; they “scarf up the last ones” any time the company announces that it is discontinuing (“retiring”) a piece.
Indeed, Drucker himself has become one of the addicts. Discovering that he didn’t have a certain house in his own collection, he abandoned his store last week, the peak of the holiday sales season. “I found out this other store had one left,” he said. “I got in my car and drove a half hour to get it. Got it for $45.”
When Chris and Mary Carnes sat down in January to budget their household for 1991, they figured in their addiction.
Although a second baby was on the way, along with hard times for his profession, real estate consulting, they managed to find $7,000 to buy more miniature stores, trees, street lights and people--their favorite an old man on a bench, reading his newspaper.
For the Carnes, as with others, it started harmlessly several years ago: They bought two houses to put under their tree, commenting how the European flavor reminded them of when Chris, now 37, was in the Air Force and they lived outside Amsterdam.
They now own 100 plus, but there wasn’t room for all in the display they began putting up after Halloween. After a month of hard labor, they made a videotape of the finished product and sent it to the contest sponsored by the hobby’s leading newsletter, the Metairie, La.-based Dickens Exchange.
“This is amazing,” said a neighbor who dropped by recently. “You should charge admission.”
“We need to get a house,” Mary Carnes said. “With more space, we could really go crazy.”
To which her husband responded: “Some people would say we’re crazy already.”
It’s a diagnosis many collectors admit to.
Alexes Shostac of Rancho Park, president of Village Addicts Anonymous, said some members have built additions on their homes “to display this stuff.”
The group will meet Saturday at one such expanded home, in Tarzana, where the exhibit features 200 miniature buildings, a ski run and a zoo. Two brothers from Santa Ana brought back small rocks from a lighthouse off the Maine coast to surround their miniature lighthouse.
One member is a psychiatrist who only six months ago bought his first few pieces, then “just started wanting them all,” Shostac said. “He called me up and said, ‘What’s going on. This is crazy. . . . This is insane.’ . . . And this man is a psychiatrist.”
Menick’s Canyon Country neighbors started giving him funny looks when they heard Christmas music coming from his garage in March, when he began assembling his display. “My name is now ‘Mr. Christmas,’ ” he said.
Unlike the psychiatrist, the 40-year-old Menick thinks that he understands his mania. He traces it to his profession--acting.
While his bald dome, bubble-shaped face and rubbery expressions have made him a leading figure in comic commercials, an actor has little say when it comes to the final product. “I can’t control the creative vision,” he noted. “Here I can.”
His display of “Old New York” is but eight by four feet, small compared to others, but it’s distinguished by unique details: Styrofoam crafted to look like New York slate; moss under the rocks, in case anyone looks; sandbars in the river. And the comedian can’t help but put a tiny Dracula-style coffin in the cemetery, his own name on it and the lid just slightly ajar. . . .
Nevertheless, Menick wasn’t confident about the Louisiana contest, which drew 400 entries. He feared that his subtleties would be overshadowed by others taking “the good old American approach--the bigger the better, lots of gadgetry and lots of bombs.”
In fact, “we don’t judge on size,” said Lynda Blankenship, who ran the contest. She said she had a hard time choosing between the “spectacular” scope of the Carnes’ display and Menick’s “breathtaking” detail, especially a park scene “you would have sworn was real. . . . It doesn’t look like porcelain people and plastic snow.”
But someone had to win. Last week, she made the call. Grand prize to the Carnes.
The Eagle Rock couple aren’t resting on their laurels. They figure that they could make their display “a little fuller,” put in more details like Menick’s. And Chris wants “real running water” to replace the simulated effect now created in a river with a sequence of blue lights. “Next year, that’s definitely the thing I’m shooting for,” he said.
Menick has already started on 1992’s display.
Mr. Christmas isn’t giving away his secrets, but already under construction is a North Pole scene designed to feature glaciers, an ice floe and, of course, Santa’s Village. There’s even one bit of gadgetry he might try this time.
“Santa’s sleigh,” he said. “If I can just create some device so it looks like the sleigh is taking off. . . .”