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 the BBC 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......