The weeks around Christmas, all through the land;
Make-believe towns and cities are put up by hand.
Some people choose scenes that are pure storybook,
While others desire that realistic look.
As to which is better, in the long run who knows?
Just so folks have some fun while the bottom line grows.
Put another way, Department 56, a Minnesota collectibles company, is enjoying this holiday season very much. For the year, the suburban Minneapolis firm expects to exceed its 1998 sales of $243 million — two-thirds of which comes from product lines that evoke Norman Rockwell.
Not bad for a business that got its name when founder Edward Bazinet decided to use an accountant’s designation for a floral and gift retailer he once managed.
These “ceramic and porcelain villages,” as they’re called, take up plenty of shelf space this time of year, and for good reason. Jenny Plack, buyer for Carson Pirie Scott’s Trim-A-Home departments, figures, “Department 56 represents 25 percent of our sales.”
At Marshall Field’s, spokesperson Lynne Galia says, “There are a lot of true collectors of Department 56 out there, and they just wait for all this stuff to come out. Their products do very well for us.”
The villages, designed to fit under the Christmas tree or on the mantle, first came on the market in 1976. There are now seven types available, with themes ranging from the Charles Dickens era to a 1950s motif — along with accessories that re-create the romance if not the reality of the particular period.
With the villages sold in more than 6,000 stores nationwide, they’re hard to miss. “We don’t have a lot of collectors for our products in Death Valley,” jokes Department 56’s Judith Price, “but outside of that our popularity tracks with population centers.”
Price can’t cite any hard demographic data, but says interest in the villages breaks about evenly among men and women. “The women are usually the ones who start it as a new family tradition. The men are attracted to the city planning aspect.”
Either way, devotees of the Charles Dickens look can fashion their Main Street with the likes of Big Ben, a pub and a china shop while anyone nostalgic for the more recent past might be tempted by a Ford dealership, a Harley-Davidson store and/or a McDonalds.
Price doesn’t see anything odd about a store under the tree for little Harley hogs. “Why not?” she asks. “It’s a great crossover market.”
Price sees the villages both as stress relievers and tradition makers. “People come home after work, look at their village and feel happy.” Such a reaction, she says, may reflect the fact that “we’re a polyglot society with different traditions from all over the world. People see this as uniquely American, although it really isn’t, and an opportunity to celebrate Christmas that way.”
Despite their success, the villages are not without problems. For openers, the tiny figures intended to populate each village don’t much resemble a polyglot society. They tend to be as white as the Minnesota countryside in mid-December.
Price acknowledges that the limited number of African-American figures available “might make for (only) a small village.”
Then there is the matter of authenticity. Dickens’ Village, for example, is not particularly Dickensian. None of the figures is dressed in rags, and they lack a poorhouse to call home.
“For the longest time,” Price says, “we didn’t have a police station” for the villages. But she does not discount the possible introduction of a poorhouse, someday and along uplifting lines.
If and when that happens, chances are it won’t come cheap since Department 56 looks to be in the midst of an affordable housing crunch.
Buildings tend to sell for between $30-$95, and collectors have a powerful motivation to buy sooner than later. When Department 56 retires a piece, it becomes a hot item in what is known as the secondary market. A diner introduced in 1986 sold for $24 and was retired a year later. One seller on the Internet is now offering it at $499, or $695 with the original box included.
Department 56 critics appear to be centered in the hobby business, which now finds itself forced to fight both for that space under the tree and a share of the holiday shopping dollar. Bill Matt, owner of Hobby City in Berwyn, belongs to a 17-member Chicagoland hobby dealers’ association, and none of them carries Department 56. “The majority of people who come to hobby shops want scale models,” Matt argues. “This is aimed at the Christmas crowd.”
At Walthers, a leading manufacturer of model trains and accessories based in Milwaukee, the idea of collecting porcelain and ceramic villages doesn’t go over very well. “Those people don’t build things,” says marketing director John Sanheim, “they buy things and plunk them down. They’re not crafters.”
To dedicated hobbyists, scale and construction count, even at Christmas. Because Department 56 doesn’t allow for that, says Walthers marketing consultant Ken Stevens, “It has more of a lollipop appeal. It’s dreamlike, where our buildings are very realistic.”
If Department 56 makes villages with the soul of Frank Capra by way of Precious Moments, the model railroaders’ universe is pure Jimmy Hoffa.
Walthers’ Cornerstone Series of HO scale buildings could be a step back into the Chicago of Carl Sandburg, with grain elevators, stockyards and all sorts of factories and warehouses. The Cornerstone catalog comes with the most retro of industrial settings, down to the belching smokestacks.
This year Bachmann Industries of Philadelphia, another maker of model trains and accessories, brought out seven HO scale buildings to launch its Cityscenes series. These are “classically designed” buildings, in the words of director of marketing Doug Blaine, with a hotel that bears a striking resemblance to the Chicago Hilton and Towers and a skyscraper that measures just under 22 inches tall.
“One of the beauties of these buildings,” explains Blaine, “is that they’re modeled after buildings from the early 1900s to the 1950s.” For anyone who fled the American city of that era and feels bad about it, Cityscenes and Cornerstone allow for at least a symbolic return, assuming the $90 price tag for the Trade Tower isn’t too high.
But devotion to scale may be a lost cause. Bachmann has hedged its bets by producing a train for Department 56. And, according to Roger Carp, associate editor of Classic Toy Trains magazine, those lighted villages are exerting a crossover appeal among hobbyists.
Don Simonini agrees. “It’s as if some collectors are trying to crunch every little ounce of nostalgia they can come up with on this piece of plywood, which would not be my approach,” he says.
Simonini, of suburban Boston, collects that granddaddy of Christmas villages — Plasticville, which Bachmann has been making in one form or another since 1946. Simonini has several hundred kits.
The 53-year-old video producer remembers, “When I was a kid, my friends and I were avid Plasticville buyers because we had train layouts. We didn’t know the right word at the time, but it was quite evocative.”
With the 30 buildings of her Department 56 Snow Village, Nancy Gelwicks is trying to evoke a sense of her own past. “I’m from Chicago, and some of the pieces remind me of the houses there.” Now living in Downers Grove, Gelwicks has a layout that in spirit at least is reminiscent of her adolescence in south suburban Calumet Park.
Gelwicks also incorporates some hobby crossover in her display, with a Lionel trolley running through the village. Because her 9- and 11-year-old sons both like trains, “The trolley is a way of bringing them into helping me with this.”
While the display “has taken over” her dining room, Gelwicks denies being a fanatical collector of Department 56. She explains that last year, she and her husband won a trip to the company’s Twin Cities headquarters at a drawing held through Carson Pirie. “Some of the people I met up in Minnesota were dedicating rooms to this equipped with special filtration systems. I’m not quite that into it,” she says.
That so many people are, though, suggests an importance beyond holiday decorating or collecting. Kenneth T. Jackson, professor of history and social sciences at Columbia University and author of an acclaimed study of American suburbanization, “Crabgrass Frontier,” thinks that, “As we become more of a suburban nation, people become more nostalgic for what they’ve lost.
“When they have these things all together, like the drugstore next to the post office next door to something else, in fact you’re seeing a visible community where it’s hard to find one today. We don’t feel comfortable where we are now, so we see that (world of Department 56 villages) as better and happier times.”
It is, Jackson notes, “a pleasant, antiseptic way to recapture an imagined past that probably wasn’t very real.”
