Our First Snow Village Display, circa 2007

Okay, so we're really space challenged, and we had no idea how many Snow Village pieces we had actually gotten. We set up a six foot x three foot table and added some height on both sides to give it the appearance of a valley. We definitely wanted to use my pieces from "A Christmas Story" (all except this year's pieces, which don't count in my opinion, because they weren't really in the movie!), so we decided to integrate them into the display. By the time we were done, we had unpacked about 24 buildings....there was no way they were going to fit, especially since we were now adding 2 cobblestone roads and 2 white fences.

We chose our 4 anchor pieces: Ralphie's house, in the upper left corner. Higbees was opposite in the top right. The Creamery was bottom right and holding front position on the bottom left was the Long Haul Truck Stop, my wife's favorite. We had the Starbucks building next to Higbees, and the Christmas Shop right below Ralphie's house.

In the Valley were the Town Hall, which was opposite the Cleveland Elementary School. The row of shops from left to right in the back were Sharky's Pool Hall, The Gazette, Gus's Diner, the Chinese Restaurant from the movie, and the Fire House, also from "A Christmas Story". We also used all of the accessories scattered throughout. The Comic Book Shop and Mighty Fine BBQ also made it into the Valley.

We ended up creating a vignette with the Stardust Movie Theatre and Refreshment Stand, as well as the Budweiser factory and clydedales.

Not bad for rookie designers, but next year we'd like to take it up a notch - by learning at a class on building a nice, elaborate display. We were waiting to be notified of a class in the area, but we never heard from the shop. All of the beautiful displays I've seen from the readers of the blog didn't dissuade me from posting my picture -- we still love it!