In true Czech tradition, a Bohemian Nativity Bonus

When I used to lecture on dolls houses and their history in the UK, I often started by saying that the miniature traditions across Europe varied - the Germanic countries, France and Britain had models of identifiable houses, often created for girls to learn how to "keep house". In the Netherlands rich women enjoyed collecting silver miniatures and displaying them in beautiful cabinets - and even the ancient Egyptians hid miniature items of food and furniture in the tombs so the dead did not go uncomfortably into the after-life.

But in Bohemia and Moravia there was little tradition of miniatures and houses in the sense that we know them. Their passion for small items went in a different direction, although it started at much the same time. The earliest known example of their tradition dates from 1560 and took the form of a Christmas creche. But don't imagine just the stable, manger, a small group of shepherds and the Holy Family as we are used to in Britain in churches at Christmas, with some kings arriving at Epiphany perhaps.....

These Christmas Creches, known as "Betlems" (Bethlehams) eventually became rather like giant model railway layouts. They comprised a whole town, or village, complete with the population engaged on its daily work, and many of them were automated.  Beautifully carved in wood, displayed in churches and monasteries, and, in smaller versions, in private houses, and still to be seen in museums around the Czech Republic today, they are wonderful creations, whether large or small....

I am sorry that the video has no sub-titles but I think the pictures speak for themselves...

And they were also made of paper - close to Bavorov there is an amazing private collection, too little known, housed in a village near Prachatice.  

The creches made a feature of the tradition of villagers bearing gifts to the baby Jesus, gifts of bread and fish, eggs and produce. They didn't just leave the gift-giving to the Magi....

We have our own creche at home, just a small one made by daughter Alison in her teens, but we had nothing special in Small Worlds.  So imagine my delight about three weeks ago when the local masseuse, who operates in the same building as Small Worlds, staggered in with a giant cardboard box filled with a huge mixture of things, some of which I hope to be able to put to use.  But mainly she kept repeating "There are figures but they are not good, badly glued together, probably no use..."

In the chaos of preparing the new window display, I put the carton into the back workshop room and forgot about it till I fell over it looking for something to set out on the table for the museum opening at the Advent Fair - I usually put a model railway out.  Thank goodness I did fall over it as I then decided to dig a little. 

And lo! A great and mighty wonder emerged (for those who are not churchgoers, this is a topical quote!) 

An icecream container at the very bottom revealed many arms, legs, heads, bodies and little figures....

I took everything out, piece by piece and suddenly realised that what I had was a complete village "Betlem", though of the nearly forty figures, only half were more or less complete.  I then spent a fascinating couple of days trying to match heads to bodies, arms to instruments or gifts to the Christchild, and then to bodies as well, and even tiny ears to piggies.  A variation on my jigsaw hobby..... By some miracle every single missing piece was locatable!

As I worked, the characters I was handling became more and more familar and then I realised that these were all figures, clearly home made, probably out of Fimo or even bread dough, and based on the paintings of the Czech iconic artist Josef Lada whose giant calendars I have collected for years.  To say I was delighted is the understatement of the year!

All plans for the table display changed on the spot, as did my choice of photo for my annual Christmas greetings, and the idea of a bonus blogpost surfaced.   So here it is, together with my grateful thanks for the icecream container and its wonderful contents, and complete with many photos, a Czech carol, and, of course, a Lada picture.   

I hope this extra post makes up a bit for the silence over the past year - you now have two posts within the space of a fortnight. (Here is the first of the duo) Must be a record!

It comes with thanks for your support and all best wishes for a Veselé Vánoce a št'astný nový rok!

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.

PS A visit yesterday to a delightful Christmas craft fair in nearby České Budějovice, the home of the true Budweiser beer, produced two little angels to join the tree fairies in the window. But I temporarily popped them into a vase in my bedroom and decided I didn't want to part with them - but I am happy to share them here!