Barbara Twogood

I am in that fog of denial that the holidays are upon us. Maybe because the stores have been full of the “trimmings” almost since July?

We also have been actively involved with our VFW’s Halloween haunted house and it is while packing and storing all the items from that event that we are also starting to pull out our holiday decorations.

Now if you have been reading my articles since last year or know us personally, you know that we have allowed a certain Christmas tradition to exist year-round in our home. We have a “permanent” village set-up that takes up an area that would normally be the dining-room/living area.

This week will be three years since we moved into our wonderful home. At that time we actually looked for a property that would allow us the room to pursue this hobby. It looked like we had lots of potential in the open floor plan, but looking around today, I’m not sure where it went!

Last year we had plans to visit family out-of-state, so we didn’t make any changes to the set-up. We did, however, continue to collect additional pieces that are stored under the lay-out tables. There may be as many as three dozen more pieces to add and this week, both a friend and a family member passed on more pieces that they were no longer using!

We have decided to “revamp” the entire set-up and expand it to the entire dining room/living area. There is some major engineering involved here to make sure there is access to power for many of the animated pieces, not to mention the train tracks and cable cars.

The other part of this project will be to document “all” the pieces for insurance purposes. Many of the natural disasters lately have made us aware of how important it is to catalogue the collections you may have and the value of them. These days it is easier to do this by just taking pictures and keeping them on a flash drive that can be updated as needed.

This may be a good time to take an inventory of all we have and maybe even see if there are items we no longer need that can be donated to one of the local charity groups.

It is amazing how far we have come in just three years and we have so much to be Thankful for. Including all the friends and family who have been so kind to read and comment on my articles.

Have a wonderful, safe and happy holiday!

Barbara Twogood is one of five Herald “Writer’s Block” writers. She can be reached at: This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it .