My Grandmother's Christmas Village

As a child, I was responsible for setting it up under the tree - it created a safe place inside of me forever

Photo by Sebastian Staines on Unsplash

It was the first or second Saturday after Thanksgiving. We got to get that village up, boy.

Somewhere along the way, from birth to when I turned 7 or 8, my grandmother decided I was the one. Like in The Matrix, when the Oracle chose Neo, my task would be to pull together a magical world of Christmas. It would not be until years later, when the pain of heartbreak or loss had knocked me off balance, skewing my commitment to goodness, that I realized the village was like an anchor.

Somehow, maybe she sensed I would leave home and travel the world — still doing so, two and half decades later — and so she wanted the sensations of building a world requiring her approval to keep me aligned.

Perched under the tree in the front room, the other nine grandkids would come and look at the final creation, but few would dare touch it. They believed this was my world. Only I would spend hours playing with the figurines, creating backstories for them that survived over the years. I was the mayor of Christmas and a like producer of the complex but perfect little reality.

In the attic, one corner contained an assortment of boxes with the words “Village” written hastily across them. Like undiscovered words on a cave wall, the magical inscription also told me to be opened only when necessary and never sooner.

The boxes themselves were part of the village lore. Like a walk down the path of America’s post-war economic boom, each added a sense of anticipation and relief. The tree, a medium-sized artificial one, was stored in a Eureka Vacuum Cleaner box. I imagined the day my grandmother opened the box, joy filling her, for she was finally getting the latest model vacuum cleaner.

The village inhabitants were packed in yellowing cotton and old newspapers in a 1947 Toastmaster box. The intricate hand-made houses, churches, and farms filled out the many other odd-shaped boxes of so many appliances that had surely made my grandmother’s life a bit more “convenient” at one time or another.

I was careful to preserve the boxes, for they played a role as vital as the one I did in this process, and a sense of continuity was instilled. The past was the present and a guide to a future Christmas, which meant responsibilities for me. Gently, I would haul them down the steps, setting them near the designated corner.

Upon opening, each piece would be gently awakened from its year-long slumber and set aside until requested to assume its rightful position in the plan rapidly taking shape.

Tucked inside the front room just beyond the front porch windows that looked out onto our town, the village aspired to be the cultural cookie-cutter for America that Freehold itself was.

In Freehold, Main Street was the church street, with seventeen for a population of only around 10,000. Main Street was where most of the commerce was concentrated. The bars, movie theaters, shops, and funeral homes, everything extended onto or reached back off Main Street as if it were reaching for an itch.

In telling someone where you lived, you said stuff like down Broadway, not far from the Post Office, or down South St., near St. Rose (where all of us got Christened, First “Communion’d,” Confirmed, Married, and eventually “Funeral’d”). Main Street was the geographical spinal chord. Gram’s house was on Marcy Street (down South Street, across from McClean), situated between the white and black sections of town.

A child of an era when Martial Law had been declared because of tensions between Black and White citizens, my village attempted to deal with the racial angst I sensed as a child.

I don’t remember when or how it happened, but one of the most important residents of my grandmother’s Christmas village was the lone Black man. Dressed like a hunter, he was missing an arm — his backstory, imagined by me, was that it had occurred fighting in France during World War I. He was a hero in my village, but in the Freehold of my childhood, he would have been required to “know his place.”

He was the only Black figurine in the village, and each year, he would assume a prime spot near the mirror, which, after being surrounded with cotton and the snow-dusted pine trees, transformed into the ice-skating pond. The ice-covered pond was the town square of sorts. Two brightly dressed ice skaters, whom Gram bought at a flea market in the 1920s, held hands and skated on legs that never tired — I envied them so.

Families with babies played nearby, dogs barked at passing ducks, and men with pipes in their mouths congregated near the Black man, sharing jokes with him, confiding in him — at least, this was the narrative I ran through my head as the villagers assumed their places year after year.

I have now realized that no one was ever given a name — perhaps I didn’t want to restrict my future experiences. I didn’t want random people from my life interfering with the perfection of that little world.

Creating the annual Christmas village was a shared experience with my grandmother that enriched me in ways that surprise me even today, 29 years later. I recall how she would pop out of the kitchen, taking a break from making dinner, and say so, you’re putting them up there? Who are you gonna put up near the farm?

I would lay out my vision and then Gram would nod with approval: Okay, boy, get to it.

Her eyes would then scan the hills of cotton balls and smaller, less formidable boxes. Narrowing her glance in on the village square — like she imagined she was there too — a smile meant she couldn’t have done the job better herself. All was in good hands, she was hinting — my hands.

Nevertheless, Gram would always return to readjust a hill or put some more animals into the village — more than I preferred. One of her sons, my uncle, had made big, clunky cows and horses out of ceramic that were, in my opinion, not to scale and so not for the village.

Gram was a mother before becoming a grandmother, so she needed to see those cows there. It was her way of saying, my love for you is endless, but there is a specific context to everything, boy, and we all need to respect this. So, put those massive animals in the village. My son made those. I would, but not without my silent protestations. I always set them behind the barn made with cardboard from 1940-something.

I moved to Russia for work and ended up staying there for many, many years. The village was packed into my brother’s basement after my grandmother sold her house. Damaged in a flood, it was eventually thrown away. For eighty years, the village had survived all that life could throw at it, and when it finally became mine, it didn’t survive a mere five — for those final years, it never left the boxes again.

Since 1994, I have traveled the world, and at first, it saddened me that I lost the village, but then it took on a new life in my memory. I found myself looking for its hints, smells, shapes, and contours throughout my travels. I wanted to make the foreign places and cultures I was experiencing recognizable to me.

Traveling so much over the years alone, the losses and hardships of life have often been experienced alone, as a foreigner in someone else’s world. Deep, bone-aching loneliness, though, has never really gripped me, thanks to the village. Fragments of it always seem to come to me in the oddest places and the most random of times, tethering me to those moments with Gram — when I seldom felt more loved and safe.

I could be eating dinner in Munich, sipping a sweet tea in a back-alley café in Hong Kong, chatting with the fruit lady in St. Petersburg, Russia, or just watching a child squeal with joy as a tram races by with all its bells blaring and whistling. Some small part of the “putting-the-village-up process” with my grandmother taps me on the shoulder and warms me with a, let’s put the farm up there this year, she would suggest with a hand on her hip.

My loneliness dissipates, and I am in the village near the ice pond.

In these moments, I hear Gram’s voice. I can see the apron protecting her from the droppings of another soon-to-be-dinner. Chewing on a piece of carrot and with her head tilted to the side as if this helped her more precisely focus on the perfection of her vision:

I think you got it right.

These memories create a narrative, framing the world around me as if everything were an illustration by Norman Rockwell. It is as if they remind me that people are inherently good — this is what my grandmother believed — and that we all must be treated kindly.

The inner village is like an anchor; it is an internal North. If a person is void of their inner village, in the spirit of my grandmother’s words of support, I gently try to guide that soul to a place where it can ground itself with some sweet memory from long ago.

I close my eyes and see the blinking lights reflecting off the hanging ornaments. I feel better than I did a minute ago. That’s the power of the village.

I feel as content as the lone Black man sitting next to the ice rink, really a mirror. Now, I will share these feelings with my son, and maybe this evening, we will see some bits and pieces of Gram’s Christmas village.