Christmas Dreaming A Little Early

It's the first week of November. You know what that means...
Yep! Time for Ken to put up his Dept. 56 Dickens "Christmas Carol" Village.
 
I know there are plenty of angry people out there who want to tell me to stick my Dickens Village where the sun doesn't shine.
"It's not even Thanksgiving!" they'll tell me. "Why must you put up Christmas decorations so early??"
To really tick them off I'll tell them that I listened to Christmas carols as I worked on it!
Heh heh...I really did.
I've always put my Dickens Village up a few days following Hallowe'en and have done so for over twenty years. And people actually get angry at me for doing so. Seriously angry. Like it's doing them harm or something.
And I just laugh at the ridiculousness of it all.

The ceramic lighted house decorations add a little bit of color and brightness to the otherwise gray November days. If you research your Christmas (and pre-Christmas) history, folks from times past would do whatever they could to brighten and liven up their wintertime darkened homes. Driving away the drab and dreariness of the cold sun-starved months was one of the reasons greenery such as holly and pine boughs were brought into the homes. It was a reminder of the springtime to come now that the winter solstice was upon them and the days would soon become noticeably longer.
Drab, dreary days indeed - so far in this 1st week of November it has been one part sun to five parts clouds with more of the same on the way.
So why not, then, bring some cheeriness into the home? And for me, there is little more cheerier than that most festive of all holidays, Christmas.

Notice the photos interspersed throughout this posting - I thought I would share just a couple of my photos from this year's Dickens Village set up. As I said, it's not nearly as elaborate as last year's (click HERE to see that) and I'm only using a dozen or so houses with a few of the key "Christmas Carol" figurines. I thought that since I only have room for a chosen few I would keep it strictly 'by the book' so-to-speak...Dickens' book.
And for the rest of our Christmas decorations, they go up directly after Thanksgiving. In fact, a few years ago I wrote of a typical Thanksgiving weekend that doesn't change much for us year to year. (Click HERE to read about it.)

On that first "official" weekend of the Christmas season we still visit Greenfield Village (sometimes dressed in our period winter clothing), cut down our tree and decorate it, and sometimes head to the Holly Dickens Festival, Crossroads Village, or even just stay home and watch one of the many versions of "A Christmas Carol" that I own.
My Dickens Village is one of those little pleasures I have that just gets me into the spirit of Christmas. I also have a Dept. 56 set for Hallowe'en (Legend of Sleepy Hollow and a few other assorted haunted houses) that I put up in October as well as the Colonial Williamsburg collection, which I just began to collect and plan to keep up year round since it is pretty historically accurate in showing colonial American history (click HERE for more on my Colonial Williamsburg set).
So, with that I will wish you an early Merry Christmas.





.