In the spirit of Christmas I decided to interview me, yours truly, interviewer and writer for the Humans of FASoS series. Because who better to interview around Christmas than the one person who is possibly the biggest Christmas fanatic at FASoS?
I like to believe that the Christmas spirit runs through my veins. In my family, it all started a few generations ago. My grandpa from my dad’s side is extremely creative and his half-timbered house with a wood-burning fireplace always was the best decorated house in the street. Christmas trees everywhere, ornaments hanging from the ceiling, Christmas greenery in every corner, twinkly lights all over the place. It looked better than any house in a Hallmark Christmas movie.
My parents also always went all out when it came to Christmas. My dad traveled a lot for work and we as a family also liked to travel and we would always bring back Christmas ornaments from the places we went. We would be searching for cute Christmas stores in July to purchase one-of-a-kind ornaments in 35 degrees weather. However, 2007 turned out to be a special year.
Dad had been searching for the perfect miniature Christmas train for years and he had finally found it in a store in Canada when he was there on a business trip. Upon his return, he suggested to start building a Christmas village together. From scratch. In September. Mom was of course very thrilled about this decision and banished us – and our ‘Christmas project’, as we liked to call it – to the attic.
We started out with a wooden plate in which we sawed half a circle (a spare so we could hook it on the foot of the Christmas tree) and some Lemax Christmas village houses. From there, we started adding relief with the use of polyurethane foam and pebbles and moss, and drilled holes in the plate so we could guide all electric wires to underneath the plate. We kept track of our process on the ‘kerstforum’, a Christmas-lovers blogosphere. We had quite a bunch of followers and if we had only done this on Instagram, I am certain we would have been Christmas influencers by now.
Each year we came up with a new idea for our Christmas village and I must say we progressed a lot, both in terms of technique and decoration, and in terms of negotiating more room and budget for the Christmas project with my mom. We were allowed to start preparations in September in the attic and we could move into the study on the ground floor as of November. On 6 December, the day after Sinterklaas and the day we always decorate our Christmas tree(s), the Christmas village was allowed to move into the living room.
In the first year, we had only a simple wooden plate (of about 1.5 meters long, 30 centimeters high and 1 meter wide), painted it white, built in a quite intricate electrical system and added the Lemax houses and some pebbles and moss as decorations. The years thereafter, we did all sorts of new things. We added an extra wooden plate for the other side of the Christmas tree and milled out a trail for a car to drive circles around our village. We also created a sledding hill out of chicken wire, papier- mâché and paint. We disassembled a pre-bought Lemax ice skating rink to only keep the mechanical system and process it into the wooden plate. We created a pond and added in a mist maker for a foggy effect, and so we had many more creative ideas.
Because of a lack of time, dad and I stopped making the Christmas village in 2017 and instead started focusing on smaller, less time-consuming projects. These are also always a lot of fun to make and what is most important is that we get to spend time together.
Happy holidays everyone!
