It's a cold December morning, and the Pass family is taking another trip to Dickensville.
Noah Pass, 6, eagerly looks for his favourite spots in the miniature basement village. An immense cityscape spread out over 10 levels, the snow-covered Christmas village fills half the room with rattling trains, warm-lit Victorian buildings and kids at play.
"The tug-of-war is on!" he says, as he spots some moving micro-kids battling in the snow. "I love you, tug of war."
Dickensville is the informal name for the large model village that Jennifer Pass has created in the basement of her North Ridge home. It's one of many similar hamlets families throughout the world build to bring Christmas cheer into their homes.
Pass, 37, says she's been working on the village since about 1998, although this is the first time she's built it in St. Albert. "It started out with a little four-piece set [my mother Sandra] bought at Costco," she says. Now it's a roughly $8,000, 36-home village complete with a church, shopping district, farms and mountains. And it's still growing.
It usually takes about a week to set up the display's 300 trees and 150 people, she says. "It's a lot of work," she says, but it's a great stress reliever.
Noah also loves it, she says. "He came wandering down one morning and gasped, 'this is awesome!'"
What the putz?
Christmas villages are a centuries-old Christian tradition that can be traced back to St. Francis of Assisi, says Amy Leiser, executive director of the Monroe County Historical Association in Stroudsburg, Pa. (where such villages are common).
Assisi made the first known live recreation of the nativity scene in Italy in around 1223, she says, a practice that soon spread throughout Europe. The German Moravians (a Protestant sect) popularized the idea of making miniature scenes in churches, often carving them out of wood. These scenes were known as putzes (from the German word "putz," or "to decorate"). When the Moravians settled in Pennsylvania, they brought the tradition with them.
Over time, people added farms, fields and buildings to the putz to create small villages, piecing them together them from rock, moss and driftwood. Families started building them in their homes and would use them as an excuse to visit their neighbours ("going putzing").
Villages took off after the Second World War when Asian manufacturers started to sell pre-made models, Leiser says. An American company called Department 56 introduced a line of collectible ceramic buildings in 1976 and now makes hundreds of different homes featuring everything from Jesus to Dracula.
A family village
Today's villages come in all shapes and sizes, Leiser says, and are often completely secular. "They are as unique as the person."
Pass says she buys one or two new buildings a year (each costs about $10) and tends to stick to ones with a Dickensian feel. "It reminds us of that old world tranquillity."
Dickensville starts with the white, lit, stained-glass church in the upper left, Pass says. Moving down the hill, you wander into the business district with its cafés and bakeries, its streets crowded with villagers bundled against the cold. There's a library, since her family likes books, and a police station, as her sister is a police officer.
Just outside town is a trapper's cabin (complete with guy in outhouse) overlooking motorized skaters and snowball fighters. A model train trundles past a nearby lighthouse, which Pass has named "Don's Light" after her late uncle.
Pass says she and her family like to sit around the village during the holidays to chat and relax. She says she'd love to leave it up year-round, and dreams of having it fill the basement. "Give it another 10 years!" she jokes.
