Decorating with Vintage Christmas Houses

This year my daughter, Emily and I experimented on a theme we started way back.  We used the little cardboard frosted houses to decorate the family room for Christmas.  We have been putting the larger houses on the shelves of  the book case in the room for a number of years.

This year we added the smaller houses and placed them in groupings around the room.  We made little miniature vignettes of snow houses by using cake plates or silver trays to corale them into mini Christmas Villages!  The cake plates also help to elevate the houses so they take up more space on the bigger shelves.  In this vignette using three houses at different heights helps to make the grouping more interesting.  Some of the houses are very old.  They came from my grandfather so they are about 100 years old.  I have treasured them from the time I was a little girl and would go to see them at his house.  Many of the original pieces of what he called “the garden” are gone or damaged.  The “garden” was a village scene under his tree with the manger scene at it’s center.  I still put it up every year, though I have had to add pieces to it to replace the old ones.  The cardboard and chalk figures have had water from the tree spilled on them and other wear from little fingers handling them and playing with them.