The (Christmas) Village
It began slowly. The first year my father only put out five or six Christmas houses. A few he already had and then a few more, found at post-Christmas sales among deflated Rudolphs and half-melted mistletoe candles. The ceramic houses were illuminated and displayed on the dining room sideboard in tight formation, not a Christmas Street, not yet a Christmas Village. It was simple, it was lovely.
At first, these decorative houses, equally sturdy and fragile, were just an extension of our family’s Christmas war chest. Some families have old cars, summer houses, or diamond pendants to pass down from generation to generation; the Mouradians pass down holiday décor. That and diabetes.
After that first year, my father got a taste for it. A ceramic high, if you will. With my Uncle Serge as part of his expanded network of suppliers, the second year of The Village spilled off the sideboard and onto a folding table. Manageable, charming, extensive. It was nice, in an "I got locked in the department store after it closed" kind of way. Everything lit up or moved or did what it was supposed to do. The porcelain kid ice skating on the frozen pond obediently did his endless figure-eights on the magnetic track; Ebenezer Scrooge displayed the tiny lumps of coal hanging off the side of his cottage.
It only took three years for things to spiral out of control. At first, my dad was in a committed relationship with Department 56, one of the many companies that make these decorative houses and villages. Department 56 was up-market, regal, delicate. Absolutely everything Debbie Jelinsky could have ever wanted. He’d come home from Fortunoff’s in the spring and summer with three houses in the Dickens Village tucked under his arm, beaming from the rush of off-season discounts.
The thing is, when the collection starts accumulating in dribs and drabs, you don’t realize how many there are. It’s like an avalanche — if you can hear the snow rushing towards you, babe, it’s too late. The snow was up to our knees before we realized my dad’s little Christmas houses weren’t just a village; they were a municipality. I turned around one day, and I’m pretty sure there was a vote for Water District Supervisor.
Those initial years I don’t remember where we stored them. They must’ve been in the attic where all our family’s greatest treasures, from broken computers to broken stereo systems, were stored. Bringing the Christmas decorations down from the attic was the only day we did a family workout, running boxes up and down the stairs like triple-sat servers at Cheesecake Factory trying to get everyone brown bread. Each year, I’d Spider-Man myself up into the attic, brace myself for the unique climate, careful to avoid both the exposed nails and the Pink Panther-colored insulation calling out to me, begging to send me through the ceiling. It was like trying to simultaneously avoid every trap Kevin McAllister planned in Home Alone. Space was limited so my strategy was to lie flat on my back and slide them over or next to me as if I were a hostage negotiator sneaking out bank workers through a tiny backalley. Not my favorite day of the year.
The Village soon encompassed the entire dining room. It took days for my dad to put it together. I was at the tail-end of college, moving in and out of my parents’ house as freely as others walked in and out of a Gap. I feigned not having time to help set up The Village, but I was 22; likely I was more focused on drinking with my friends in bars that no longer exist due to lack of interest and health code. To me, it was as if one day I asked someone to pass the salad in the dining room, and the next we were the overlords of a small town I wasn’t entirely sure hadn’t become sentient. There’s a version of this story where I am the servant to a 3-inch ceramic figurine named Todd, with a permanent painted smile and dead black eyes. I shudder, but also, like, Todd — tell me what to do with my life!
From November until January, there was no dining room, complicated for parents who liked to entertain. Yet they persevered as relatives and friends from exotic locations such as New Jersey and Suffolk County, Long Island came to pay homage to The Village. And you know what? It was wild; Impressive, truly something to behold. By the time it was at its peak in years 4 and 5, there were so many houses they had to be layered on platforms of Styrofoam. The Village had multiple altitudes.
After a while, my dad stopped caring about the brand of house or the specific collections that went together. The Great Gatsby collection of swanky porcelain houses, right next to a bright neon circus playing The Entertainer, right next to what I’m pretty sure was the Batcave. If it wasn’t, it didn’t matter because the Batmobile was roaming the plastic streets. Much like a Fast & Furious movie, The Village was better the less sense it made. It was my dad’s version of improv; he ‘Yes and’ed’ it until The Colonial Mayor’s Mansion, Hogwarts, The Blacksmith’s Shoppe, and Superman’s Fortress of Solitude were all finally where they belonged — together. My dad loved to host people, to entertain; now he was doing it for The Village with a suspected population north of 5,000. He loved it deeply, so while it was easy to tease him, it was also impossible not to love it alongside him. He was that kind of guy.
My parents’ house had always been a kind of home base for my friends and me. (Or maybe everyone feels that way about their childhood home; I don’t know.) Word of The Village spread widely enough that most of my friends saw it at least once during the holiday season. He would, of course, revel in giving them tours. "Oh, is that a water feature? Is that running water?" I remember my best friend, Carla, asking. You could look at it for hours — drunk or sober— and never see everything.
“Is that Harry Potter?” my other friend Jenn asked.
“You mean Hogwarts?” I asked.
“No,” she said picking up a figurine that was likely a Lego or plastic action figure, “Harry Potter.”
We laughed, but I scolded her for touching it — his eyes were everywhere.
The Village stopped being displayed long before my dad died in 2016. After a few years, my father successfully overwhelmed himself. Unable to resist a bargain when houses were on sale, occasionally being led back astray when my uncle saw a good deal at work, there were too many houses to display. There were doubles — and later we discovered, triples — of houses. We had to protect the integrity of The Village, so it was shuttered. The paperwork was filed with the Town Hall, notarized by 'Ye Old Notary Shoppe, and that was that. My sister's old bedroom became a Christmas storage unit, filled with boxed houses and bins of accessories I didn't realize existed. It was ivy wildly growing, taking everything over, except it was surge protectors, mini-light bulbs, and fake pinecones. In his defense, it isn't easy to power and manage an entire metropolis. Loveable, capable, and caring as my father was, he was in slightly over his head as mayor of a town which needed its own zip code.
I remember asking him once why he didn’t put up The Village anymore. He looked at his hands, as he sometimes did, and defeatedly answered sort of to no one, "There’s just so many of them…." He said this as if the purchase of a bedroom full of Christmas tchotchkes was something that was thrust upon him, something that was done to him. He really was the very best.
In the summer after we lost my dad, my mom was getting ready to sell the house. A bunch of my friends came by to help clean out attics and sheds and myriad other projects. My friends Tara and Amanda had the unenviable task of “go do something with the Christmas houses.” They attempted organization, but that was almost laughable. They foolishly tried to throw out what, to the naked eye, seemed like a piece of Styrofoam but learned it was a mountain carved out of Styrofoam. Amanda opted to climb into the attic on a scorching July day instead.
The truth was, as silly as it sounds, those houses were the most tangible thing we had left of him. They only looked like a Coca-Cola Factory with a working soda fountain when they were a thousand ceramic pieces of him; his Lemax Horcruxes, so to speak. In retrospect, maybe we weren’t ready to get rid of any piece of it. “I think there are three of this exact house,” Tara implored. All three remained in that room for another six months.
We tried again to regain control of the situation. My sister, Lola and I brought all the houses, boxed, down to the dining room. Lola tried valiantly to catalog them, but you could sooner count every star in the sky. It seemed the more we tried to wrangle the houses, the harder they were to get straight. They seemed to be replicating, like Gremlins in a rainstorm.
It was then, seeing them all out in the dining room for the first time in years, we decided that we would scatter his houses like his ashes (he was not cremated). My sister, mother, and I took the ones we wanted, a respectable but surprisingly not-too-overwhelming number. Later, we had my entire family — cousins, aunts, uncles — pick whichever houses they wanted. My sister took a couple for her friends, we shipped to my aunt and cousins who weren’t local, and I had my friends over for a barbecue to get the others placed. Friends’ mothers’ got a few; the guy who painted the house before putting it on the market got a few more. I found myself starting sentences saying, “I know this might sound weird but…” to offer Christmas houses to my favorite barista or the mailman. An exaggeration, but only a slight one. All in all, we found these houses good homes.
Every year, texts and social media posts stream in from friends and family with their pieces of The Village. Carla’s has a little sign that says “Mr. M’s Christmas Village;” my other friend Kristin puts hers up every year, making sure to talk to her kids about why it’s important to her and Uncle Eddie. After someone you love dies, you have to make a thousand decisions for them, questioning yourself with each one. Giving away these dumb little Christmas houses to the people he loved — to the people we love — was, without any doubt, the best thing we could have done.
I don’t believe any proper pictures exist of The Village. Sadly, we didn’t have a crane, and drones were not as ubiquitous as they are today. You’d need the height to really do it justice.
