The Christmas Village

I have a Christmas Village. I have collected the pieces over the years and have a very eclectic looks to my village. It was fun to look up and read the history of the Christmas Village. I have a perfect spot on a beautiful bookcase in my den to display my village. I often look at it and think of the people who have given me the various pieces of my village.

The earliest known Christmas villages weren’t villages at all—they were actually small nativity scenes. During the Renaissance, people in Italy would act out live nativity scenes to help tell the Christmas story. Eventually, small nativity displays were created so they could be set up for longer periods of time (and didn’t require live animals). As the practice spread throughout churches and homes in Europe, the scenes were adapted to regional styles and customs. The figures started to look less like biblical figures and more like characters from the local village.

In Moravia (an area of the Czech Republic), families placed large villages around the manger. They included houses made of paper or cardboard, often called Putz houses, and used mirrors to create frozen ponds. Families created these elaborate displays on their own using materials found in their homes and the surrounding countryside.

The practice of setting up nativity displays and Christmas villages came to the United States with European immigrants. American retailers later popularized the practice across the country.

F.W. Woolworth, the father of dime stores, traveled extensively through Europe in the late 1800s and brought German cardboard Putz houses to the broader American marketplace. Americans were already in love with imported German toys and glass ornaments, so when this new German Christmas item became available, they bought them in record numbers

After World War II, sales of the classic Putz houses dwindled because Americans didn’t want to support German- or Japanese-made goods. As a result, the practice of setting up a Christmas village dwindled during the 1950s and 1960s. Cultural shifts, such as the addition of the television to the living room, also reduced the available space for an elaborate Christmas village display.

There was a resurgence of the village trend in the 1970s and 1980s as sturdy ceramic houses came onto the scene, replacing the fragile cardboard structures. These were easier to store from year to year, and they could also be passed along as heirloom pieces to the next generation.

While large Christmas villages don’t typically dominate homes the way they did in the early 1900s, our nostalgia for them runs deep. Today, you can find all kinds of villages online and in stores. Retailers carry everything from incredibly detailed villages with a strong Norman Rockwell sensibility to ultra-sleek white Christmas village houses.