Dickensian Village

 Dickens Village - Not Mine

I finished with my Christmas Dickens village. I had not put it up for a few years, for it seemed there was always a shortage of time.

I put it up in a new spot that allowed me to create a vague semi-circle about a ceramic town well. Around this I put four lampposts which run on two C batteries. Four lampposts does not seem like much, but it is a lot when you have to work out how to anchor them and how to run the wires so they are not seen.
There are only six houses, but it seems enough: Scrooge's house, the Poulterer's store, the Counting House, the Old Curiosity Shop, a Tavern, and a thatched roof cottage.

The lay-out was on a corner of the library desk, and measured 34 inches wide by 24 inches deep. The six houses with some other figurines were enough to create a cozy central square, yet allowing for a outlying structure - the cottage out the old main road by the cross at the four corners!
The layout is white felt and poly fiber. I had set it out on the floor first, measured it up, then worked out how to run wires, then to obscure the wires and the bumps and rills in the felt.

I pulled fiber and placed it extending from chimneys to tree branches, like a misty smoke on a cold, brisk Christmas morn.

I finally sat down around 1:00 PM and looked across the room at it. It looked not bad, I thought.
The phone rang, and it was my niece calling to tell me why she sounded so distant when I had called her up this morning.
I had called because she was to have gone with her daughters to my mother's to put ornaments on the tree I had put up Monday past, and when she answered the phone this morning, she acted  as if she had just awakened. I told her the tree was up at mom's, so have at it.
I felt as if I had called too early, although it was 9:00 AM. I had been up since 4:00 AM.
She called back at 1:00 to explain her car would not start in the cold this morning, so she was at sixes and sevens when I called her earlier.
And she would not be going to my mother's.
Too cold for 60 miles in a dubious automobile.

Well, that is fine, because I had talked to my mother yesterday, and she said she had put up about three-quarters of the Christmas tree ornaments herself. I told her to slow down, that my niece - her granddaughter - and her girls might want to put a few up.
My mother said she could not imagine that group decorating a tree the way she wanted it done.
I said that maybe they were looking forward to it like some sort of weird Christmas-Tree-Grandma-Cookies-and-Ornaments good time they could enjoy and would remember scads of years hence.


My mother granted the plausibility of such shenanigans - if not monkey shines - and said she'd leave a pile of ornaments aside for them.

I left all this out when I spoke to my niece.

I mean... really! What does one have to do at Christmas time?!

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