It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas...

I am so excited!  Yesterday I finished my twin granddaughters' green corduroy Christmas jumpers. I think they turned out very well, and those two little cutie pies are going to look simply adorable in them.

Now I just have to wrap the rest of the gifts we got for them and their sweet parents, and I can mail their Christmas box off to Colorado.

I hung the twins' jumpers under my Christmas village, which I absolutely love.  I never intended to have a lit-up miniature village, like my mother does.  "I have enough Christmas decorations already!" I'd tell myself.  But are there ever really enough?  If you asked either my mom or my late mother-in-law, the answer would be a resounding "NO!"

But still, I fought the urge to start one.  I fought it, and I fought it.  Then two Christmases ago, when I was in Sears shopping for something else, I spied this Dept. 56 ceramic house marked down 60%--before Christmas!  Do you recognize it?  Can you see the leg lamp in the middle window?  (Click to enlarge for a better view.)

That's right!  It's Ralphie's house!  From the classic movie "A Christmas Story," one of my all-time favorites. If it had been full-price, I could have resisted...but I took that house home with me, along with a figurine of Ralphie checking his mailbox for his Little Orphan Annie decoder ring and one of him trying to hoist up his younger brother Randy, who "lay there like a slug [in his overwhelmingly bulky snowsuit]; it was his only defense."

Right after that Christmas, I returned to Sears and picked up the floor model of Ralphie's school, priced at 75% off.  The sign over the front door read "Cleveland Elementary," but my astute husband reminded me that the school in the movie was actually called "Warren G. Harding Elementary" (and Warren G. is a distant relative of mine--more about that some other day!); so I made a new sign out of card stock and glued it over the erroneous sign.

I was pleased with my little "A Christmas Story" village, which now had two buildings as well as several new figurines, including the boys standing around the flag pole in the school yard, triple-dog-daring Flick to stick his tongue on the cold metal.  But I wasn't satisfied yet; because even though the movie didn't feature a church, I wanted my village to have one. And I didn't want it to be just any church, but a CATHOLIC church.  So in my travels through the after-Christmas sale aisles that same year, I came upon a beautiful Dept. 56 church called "Our Lady of Grace," with a statue of Mary up in a niche near the bell tower. At $100, I never would have bought it; but at half off, I couldn't resist (even though it was still rather pricey).  So now Ralphie, Randy, et. al. had a Catholic church in their village, and I didn't intend to add any more buildings to it.

Except for the "Chop Suey Palace," where Ralphie's family ate their Christmas dinner after the Bumpuses' dogs ate their turkey...I picked that one up at Walgreen's at an after-Christmas sale last year, and it sits on my oak sideboard...

But that's it...no more miniature houses...I mean it...I do!