Inside out at Christmastide

I have made three attempts to produce a blogpost over the past year, to cover the changes in the window display and other happenings in Small Worlds. The photos of both the Playmobil summer display (thanks granddaughter Anya!) and the display of mainly early 20th century fashion that preceded it, were buried deep in the mysteries of the laptop/tablet. I thought my life not long enough to try to extract them from the depths, but the combined efforts of me and my daughter Alison, plus much agitated cursing, extracted a couple of photos of each as a glimpse of what was to be seen.  

I will now move rapidly on to today, and hope that I can at least deliver the photos of the current display to the right place on blogger without more agitation.

Hopefully this will be fourth time lucky in the attempt to produce a blogpost in 2025. It will require a giant leap from December 2024 to December 2025. The new window display went in last week, ready for the Advent Market in Bavorov which took place very successfully on 29th November. There was an impressive array of crafts in the building directly opposite the museum, and we had approximately sixty people through our own doors.   A challenge, given the size of the room.   Fortunately there were two of us to field the rush - daughter Alison was working in The Stables as my workrooms down the corridor are known, on what in my head is becoming known as My Final Project, and a cry for help as I was overwhelmed by the flood got a quick response each time.

There was some debate about what to display in the Christmas window this year - we considered using two almost identical houses and creating a typical suburban 1930s British street

but a lack of suitable figures to people it stopped that idea in its tracks. But thinking about suitable figures brought to mind a group of somewhat larger dolls who have rarely figured in Small Worlds (since really I don't collect dolls!).  I never think of showing off those that I have somehow acquired, other than the ones living in the houses of course. 

I knew I had an Edwardian girl complete with fancy hat, muff, and a tartan red velvet gown, a kind gift from someone who didn't appreciate the difference between dolls and dollshouses, and I thought I could create a scene of her taking tea in an elegant room setting. However that thought was stymied by not having any crockery the right size despite unearthing a multitude of tea sets of every other shape and size. Sadly I forgot to take her picture before I discarded her hat and muff, both of which have now vanished of course.

In the course of crockery-hunting, I discovered two more not dissimilar dolls, also garbed in red velvet, one of them in an unspeakably ugly costume which annoyingly I also didn't photograph before dismantling it.  (It shows how out of practice I am in writing blogposts. Previously, photographing every stage of the process would have been automatic.)  The beginnings of a scene began to take shape in my head - not an elegant tea time but the chaos of tree and parlour decorating perhaps?

In the meantime, I also found two dolls of the same scale in the children's corner, snugly clad in winter gear.

Plus a little vintage doll someone had dropped into the museum quite recently.

I get lots of delightful presents from visitors who remember they have something at home that they no longer need, and I am in fact currently planning a spring window display to show off some of the gifts.

Clearly, the three outdoor dolls would not fit into the parlour chaos so we needed two scenes.  Our giant display window neatly divides into two halves and we mostly curse about the bar down the centre, but in this case it was exactly what we needed.  Indoors and outdoors, what could be better....?

Then it was just a matter of searching through the stash of items I have collected over the years to see what I could put together as meaningful scenes. I say "just" but you have to visualise the bomb-blasted nature of my storerooms. You can be pretty sure that I will have an idea of the things I possess, but to actually find them is another matter entirely! 

Take the sledges, for example. Both Alison and I are sure that somewhere there is a wicker sleigh large enough to take one or even both of the dolls.   Hah! I went through every likely box or drawer, both in the museum room itself and in the three work rooms. Not a sign.   I tried a couple of places at home but if that's where it is, it will still be up in the loft with the Christmas decorations....

So I bought a small sleigh that would do... and then of course found another in the stash. Though not the wicker one which still hasn't appeared. But at least now the dolls can race each other down the mountain...

And then there were the polar bears and penguins. I knew I had some, along with a couple of seals, because it turned out 

I had used them in a Christmas card exactly ten years ago.  Indeed, I had spotted the bears and penguins this time as I was sleigh-hunting. I thought I knew where they were.  No.   Not there. Nor anywhere else. Ah yes, the seals did make an appearance, but I wanted the other animals more.

By this time, since I had also been spotting and earmarking a number of other things to use in both scenes, I had realised that SMS (Senior Memory Syndrome) now requires me not to just "earmark" an object to pick up later, but that it is imperative to at once convey it to one single place where everything I might need can easily be retrieved.

Since I was not only preparing the window scenes, but also putting aside things I could add to the dollshouses to make them a bit Christmassy, and at the same time working on the current, and probably last, big project - an antiquarian bookshop - this resulted in a different kind of chaos, Christmas stuff all muddled up with second-hand books. 

In the end I just took everything along the corridor to the museum itself, dumped it all on one big table, and hoped for the best.

I had found a wardrobe the right size for the room scene but where there should have been a mirror, was an ugly glass picture.....

I managed to extract it without cutting my hand and then, wonder of wonders, found that I had a mirror that almost exactly fitted.

A bit of jiggery-pokery with some lace glued to a strip of wood filled in the gap at the top and you can barely see it anyway as Ugly Sister Number Two preens herself in front of the mirror, No dirtying of her hands for her! I have no clue where or when I acquired her originally, but helpfully she needed nothing doing to her.

Doll Three almost defeated me. I really didn't want red velvet triplets....On examination I realised that the ugly huge green velvet skirt could be removed and below that he/she was wearing male undergarments.  For a while I toyed with the idea of using the green skirt as a table cover a la Victorian hiding of table legs as they were considered indecorous, but in the end the table was too big and a smaller one came along, so I dumped the thought. That happens all the time as one proceeds through a project.

On her/his head was a giant green velvet cushion which I managed to remove without taking too much hair along with it. It works somewhat better on the sofa than on the doll's head!

That left me with a green circle of material on top of the head which I managed to pull together to form a sort of beret - since I had already decided the doll had to be placed facing away from the audience - I now had a reasonable boyish character to insert in the scene.

The final puzzle was to decide on the size of Christmas tree required - there are dozens in the stash, of many sizes.  Once that was settled, it was just a matter of laying things out.  

Oh no, I have forgotten the backdrop.   I have a small wooden puppet theatre that served the purpose admirably,

 with a covering of wallpaper and a dado of lincrusta paper. The scene also needed some paintings to fill up space over the sofa and by the wardrobe. I gathered up all the little frames I could find, dug out the calendars of Josef Lada  paintings

which I started collecting in 2008, and chose some suitable pictures I could cut out and frame. 

I love Lada, an iconic Czech artist and have used him before ....

..... all being well he will feature again in a bonus blogpost just before Christmas....

The outdoor scene was easier since I knew I only needed the materials and participants. Daughter Alison, also known in the past as Butterfly in the crafting world, would be putting the display into place, and she can deal with mountains and snow much better than I can. So I rounded up (finally!) the absent polar bear, a couple of penguins (where are the others?), the seals, and our wonderful giant trees which appear every year in some scenario or other, and left that part to her.  Our only disagreement was whether a baby in a ancient pram (another recent gift) should appear in the snowy wastes.

I wanted him in, she wasn't so sure.   However we finally agreed that if he was under the protection of the tree fairies  (who clearly manage to keep the trees snow-free and hence must be creating warmth in that area) he would be safe enough....

So there you have it. Nearly Christmas once again! I leave you with an iconic Christmas song

and an array of photos to complete the Advent Offering.

And the last two are the blurry ones taken through the glass from outside, just to give you an idea of the whole window.....

I wish you all the best for a peaceful Advent season. See you again with the magical Lada just before Christmas, and thank you for joining me again after such a very long absence.

Winter in Sylvania

Well, well, well, I see with some horror that the last post I wrote went straight from Christmas to Easter. And lo, now we are going directly from Easter to Christmas again! I know that time speeds up as one grows older, but really I hadn't bargained for quite that rate of acceleration...

Apologies to everyone who follows my blog for the massive delay. In my defence it is not quite as bad as it seems since there were three posts scheduled during that time which for various reasons never made it to publication.  But they are still hovering in the background and I am going to try and publish them in the coming year. Most of the photos are ready but two of the texts are coming from elsewhere so some coordinating will be necessary. Watch this space - if you haven't given up on Cestina's Dolls Houses entirely.

In the meantime I am hugely grateful to my daughter, Alison, aka as butterfly in some parts of the crafting world, for her once again taking on both creating the window display and writing the blogpost along with it whilst I was in England packing up my accommodation there. Yes, I am now fully and permanently based in the Czech Republic!

So I will now hand over to Alison, and sign off once she has done.....

Hello all, Alison (butterfly) here, on winter window duty.  Anyone familiar with my blogposts at Words and Pictures will guess that you're in for a long-ish sort of a post, so warm up some mulled wine or hot chocolate, and away we go...

Standing in the work rooms, looking around for inspiration, my eye fell on the Sylvanian manor house.  Even in its unadorned state, it is a feast of festive red and white with green front doors, and I thought there was probably something that could come together around it.  Plus it's nice and big, so it fills up lots of window space - at least half of it!  (It turns out that in the Sylvanian catalogue, it's known as the Sylvanian Regency Hotel.)

The sheets of snowy textured fabric were still pretty near the surface after being used for last year's stagecoach extravaganza, Dashing Through the Snow, as well as plenty of fir trees.

As I started to dig out the Sylvanian Families, though, it quickly became apparent that they were extremely inadequately dressed for winter weather... skimpy summer dresses, dungarees worn with nothing underneath, short-sleeved shirts and so on.  Last time they came out to play, it was Spring, of course, so you can see more of what I mean in the Sylvanian Spring posts, outdoors and inside.

Clearly, they needed some scarves and shawls in order to wrap up warm against the chill.  Fortunately, there are bags and bags of fabric scraps in the workrooms, so I dug out some warm and cosy ones in bright wintry colours, as well as some with a bit of a festive gleam to them.

Then I took my little haul and lots of Sylvanian animals home to dress them up.  I snipped scarves and shawls and wrapped and tucked until everyone looked ready to go outdoors.

                           

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They definitely needed to be wrapped up warm, because in the meantime my brain had been working on the other half of the window.  The new display was to be revealed on the day of the Advent Market here in Bavorov, an afternoon of craft stalls and festivities and singing and drinking leading to the ceremonial lighting of the (huge) tree in the square at dusk.  (The angel with the trumpet at the foot of it is my height, around 5'6", so that tells you it's pretty big.)  

So I decided that one half of the window would be the Sylvanian manor, decked for Christmas, and in the other half we would have our own tree lighting ceremony in the window of Small Worlds (in the land of Sylvania, obviously).  Time to deck the manor house...

One of the great delights of the construction of this large house is that it opens up to form two wings - a much better shape and size to go in the window than in its boxy closed form.  

I dug out greenery of various forms from the workrooms to play with...

I added snow to the eaves and lintels and window frames...

... and tucked festive greenery around the foot of each window, where the window boxes full of (pink) flowers usually go.

I decorated a tree to stand in the main ballroom upstairs, just where the double doors open on to the terrace, and chanced on a helpful Christmas wreath for the front door.

And I even added some small fir trees to the snowy rooftop, though that's not where they ended up.

Now I needed to find a tree to decorate for the ceremony.  It would be have to be positioned downstage - ie, in the foreground of the window, otherwise all the animals would end up standing with their backs to us - and be large enough to be an impressive communal tree, without being so big that the animals would look silly next to it.  There is a giant tree in the workrooms, and I had the too-small bottle brush trees, but in order to have one that was just right (yes, I know, it's all very Goldilocks), I had to sacrifice the beautiful fir trees that I actually rather like having as part of the decorations at home...

I decked the tree out in tiny baubles which I've had in my own Christmas decorations hoard for decades, and at the end you'll see it's got a little something extra too.  There are undecorated trees beside it... I'm imagining the villagers choose a tree growing just on the edge of the forest each year and make that their Christmas tree, rather than chopping it down and dragging it elsewhere.

And then I started to arrange the animals around it for the ceremony.  The crowd is starting to gather... 

Some of them are feeling the cold...

... others are spellbound by the magnificent scale of the tree.

There's a little troupe leading the singing...

... and some squirrels from the mansion are scurrying to join the festivities a little late.

Speaking of which, most of the squirrel family who live in the manor house are not at the tree-lighting ceremony, because unfortunately it happens to have clashed with the arrival of their Christmas guests. 

They are waiting on the balcony to wave...

... and one hardy soul has ventured out of the front doors, wrapped up warmly, of course...

... to greet the cars pulling up the driveway in the snow.

The visitors have come bearing gifts - wooden crates full of them...

.... as well as additional contributions to the decorations and feasting... 

... though as you can see, one of the baby bunnies is more interested in looking out of the back of the car at the singing and celebrations going on around the Christmas tree than in what lies ahead.

As always, it's tricky to capture the full effect through the window, what with the bars and the reflections...

... so many of the photos here are taken from "behind", as it were.

But I do like trying to capture a few little details from the front (which you can just about manage if you press the camera lens up against the glass between the bars)... the stories people find if they stand in front of the window for long enough, looking at what's going on.

And just so you can get the idea of the general layout, I think it's worth sharing just a couple from further back.

And yes, there are lights in the tree!  

It's just a little battery set, so unfortunately somebody needs to go up to the museum especially to turn them on and then off again.  

I had them lit as it was getting dark on the day of the Advent Market, though not since then. 

But I plan to do it on Christmas Eve for sure, as many villagers will make their way past the museum on their way to Midnight Mass at the church.

The mansion also looks pretty amazing when the museum lights are on, as it looks as though there is light coming from within the house, so on Christmas Eve I'll probably also add a little lamp directly behind the house for a similar effect.  

Oh, and one last little detail... I mentioned that the little fir trees from the mansion rooftop had to go and do duty elsewhere.  So now the roof is adorned with this rather splendid fabric tree which, as far as Cestina and I can remember, was made by my Danish aunt's mother... keeping it in the family again!

That's more than enough from me... I'll leave you with season's greetings, and hand you back to Cestina to sign off.  

Thank you so much Alison - it's a perfect window and brilliant that you found the much-neglected giant Sylvanian manor house. It has been lurking in a corner of the workrooms since we opened eleven years ago.

And because Christmas is all about tradition I will end with some music, as I have done each year in the Christmas blog. This time it is the beautiful Ukrainian "Carol of the Bells". To add to the tradition list, it is sung here by The King's Singers, a group that we have followed as a family since the 1970s. Each year we still watch, on Christmas Day, the carefully preserved recordings of their Christmas shows on ITV in 1981 and 1983. The group, of course, has changed many times over the years as you can see from the link, but their sound is still immediately recognisable and to us is a part of Christmas.

We wish you all a gentle Christmas and a peaceful 2025......