Millennials Are Coming for the Tiny Collectible Christmas Village

Recently, while thrifting with friends, my eye caught something spectacular: a tiny bookstore. Two stories tall, with a turret, there were letters sprinkled across the exterior and book carts parked outside. Its door swung slightly ajar, as if waiting to welcome me in. Though it came with no box and was clearly missing a couple of broken-off pieces, including a sign and a weather vane, I had to have it. I didn’t realize it then, but in shelling out my $10, I was tumbling down a rabbit hole into a carefully rendered, elaborately detailed pocket universe: villaging.

"It gives you a good feeling when you look at it, no matter what time of year," explains Brandon Taylor, who keeps hundreds of pieces up year-round in a series of lovingly constructed builds.

If you’re 40 or younger, perhaps you have a mental image of a Christmas village from your own childhood—the work of your mom or grandma, sometime in the ’80s or ’90s. That mental image probably has a whiff of Norman Rockwell, with a frisson of Thomas Kincaide. It may seem like a relic from another era in real estate: there’s something distinctly pre 2008 housing crisis about so resolutely devoting a big chunk of space (however temporarily) to something without any practical function. Aren’t the credenzas and sideboards where these things usually go one of those things millennials killed off—and dining rooms too, for that matter?

But as I came to discover, there’s a thriving collector scene for them, and reason to believe millennials are about to rediscover Christmas villages in a big way. If they can just figure out where to put them.

The custom of building tiny towns for Christmas is very old. For a particularly gorgeous example, look to New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. Every year, the Met builds out an exquisitely crafted Neapolitan Baroque Nativity scene, one that is so much more elaborate than a simple vignette of the Holy Family visited by the Magi in the manger. It’s supposed to be Bethlehem in the year 1 A.D., but scenes from an 18th century Mediterranean port wind all the way around the tree—there’s a fruit seller, a man passed out drunk against a cart, and a little stone structure lit with an electric candle, so you can just barely see somebody sitting inside at a table. Teeming with everyday life, it has what can only be described as Christmas village energy.

The modern Christmas village is generally considered a descendant of the "Putz" houses brought to America by Moravian immigrants, which ranged from simple vignettes to entire landscapes. Fairly simple houses made out of paper, often encrusted with glitter, were a common midcentury Christmas decoration, which you still see pop up in antique stores and on Etsy.

A village mass-produced in ceramic or porcelain is a fairly recent invention though —which makes sense, when you consider how aggressively nostalgic they are. The first two lines launched by the company that would become the high-end purveyor Department 56 were Snow Village, in 1976—"The Original Snow Village has been built with the same traditions and values found in small towns all across America for over 45 years," the company’s website promises—and Dickens’ Village, in 1984.

But the mandate has expanded quite a bit. Nowadays, there’s an almost mind-boggling degree of variety within the Christmas village world. Emily Lee-Linehan, Director of Marketing at Lemax, a prominent producer of Christmas villages, says they’ve got about 2800 SKUs across all their product lines. Many of those are part of Lemax’s Halloween line Spooky Town, but the rest are spread across Caddington, the Victorian offering that launched their village business; Vail, their mountain theme; Plymouth Corners, which is seaside; Jukebox Junction, which is ’50s Americana; Sugar and Spice, a sort of Candyland; and Santa’s Wonderland, which is fairly self-explanatory. They also have a general category, for stuff that works across lines, like trees, or the "Trash Bandits," a figurine of raccoons raiding a couple of garbage cans, which sells well for retailers all over the world. "People really like that, you know?" Lee Linehan says.

Department 56, meanwhile, gets even more far-out: with varying degrees of overt seasonality, they have a Disney village, a Harry Potter village, a Grinch village, a Nightmare Before Christmas village, and even a Game of Thrones village. At one point, they had a Margaritaville village (now retired), complete with Flip Flop Repair Shop, with an SRP of $125. Their offerings, generally, are not cheap: Holly’s Card & Gift Lighted Building from the Christmas in the City collection, for instance, will set you back $150. (Lemax is priced more affordably, so somebody might be able to afford two or three houses, plus some accessories, for the same price.)

At the simplest, most entry level, these villages are Christmas decorations that the casual fan can set out on their mantle every December. But the more detailed they get, the more they start to resemble, essentially, dollhouses for adults: perfect, satisfyingly tiny recreations of real life, filtered through the eye of the beholder.

But the central appeal hasn’t strayed too far from the original concept. What does well for Lemax is "anything that screams Christmas," says Lee-Linehan. You turn down your lights, you plug in your village, and "you just feel that Christmas spirit," explains Taylor, who is the president of the National Council of 56 Clubs, an organization dedicated to collecting Department 56, specifically. "You want to smile."

Aesthetically, that concept is pretty traditionalist, explains Anna McPherson, a lifelong collector and VP of the National Council of 56 Clubs: "You’re not really gonna see, say, the Guggenheim in a Christmas village. That would be awesome! But you’re not gonna have a modernist kind of approach." Which is not to say that cities themselves are incompatible with villaging (as opposed to most Hallmark movies); in fact, one of Department 56’s popular lines is the Christmas in the City line. (That’s where my bookshop came from.) You can even purchase famous skyscrapers such as the Chrysler Building. But it’s very hard to picture, say, Boston’s famously brutalist Government Center given the Christmas Village treatment.

Every collector has different strategies for creating that Christmas-y vibe, though, and even within lines, the way that individual collectors design their villages varies widely. Taylor admits he likes to go a little over-the-top: "Like, I’m a Star Wars nut, and I have the Death Star in the corner of the sky over the North Pole," he explains, adding, "I like to throw in little Easter eggs throughout the village, things I’m interested in, things my family’s interested in. So it’s not your typical display, and that’s what displaying is all about—we may all have the exact same village, but it’s how we display it."

Collectors don’t just plop their pieces out every December and call it a day. They put a great deal of thought and effort into their landscapes and the techniques that might produce the best build. For instance, while some villagers might use cotton batting for their snow, Taylor prefers a hotwire knife and carves styrofoam landscapes. There’s a certain amount of urban planning involved, too: "I put older buildings together in an old town section," explains McPherson. She asks herself which buildings make sense clustered together, and which don’t: the bakeries are spread out, but the trades make sense set off together. She can whip up a small vignette in a few hours or a day, but a big display could take months.

One of the most memorable builds that Taylor has ever seen involved a disaster: a collector’s shelf broke, sending several valuable pieces to the floor. She took those shattered pieces—from Department 56’s Dickens line—and turned it into a scene from the Blitz, complete with smoke and lights to simulate fires, soundtracked by a Winston Churchill speech. He admits that’s not the typical Christmas village, but it certainly stuck with him.

Christmas villages seem like just one more thing that millennials will kick to the curb and Gen Z will finish off forever. There’s absolutely something a bit Boomer—or even a Boomer’s parents—about the whole endeavor, which often veers wildly toward kitsch. For multiple decades now, people have been unloading things exactly like Christmas villages from relatives’ basements. "Being 41, I blame my generation for the death of a lot of collectibles," says Taylor. "The minimalists—they’re trying to get away from all these ‘dust collectors.’"

At the same time, he said, he’s seen a lot of people in their 30s and even younger online falling for Christmas villages. (In fact, he broke off our interview to help a customer who walked into his shop—a man in his 30s who wanted to start his own village.) He cited the popularity of the Halloween villages and the Harry Potter collection by Department 56 specifically as attracting a lot of young people. McPherson has also started to notice prices ticking up in the secondary market, and they’re both seeing more young people online interested in the topic.

"With maximalism and this grandmillennial style that’s now really prevalent in home style, I think that that is trickling in," says McPherson, of people increasingly interested in starting a collection or keeping one handed down from their parents, rather than immediately offloading it. (Childhood nostalgia probably plays a part too.) It’s easy to imagine Christmas villages following the path carved by the Lenox Spice Village, a set of charmingly fussy, whimsical pastel houses produced by the tableware company in the late ’80s and early ’90s that were recently rediscovered by TikTok. (In fact, it’s what I was looking for when I found the bookshop.) They’re almost jaw-droppingly dated—and extremely appealing.

Which doesn’t mean that there won’t be some adjustments necessary. For instance, Lemax works with an influencer, Lynn Lilly, specifically to show off the ways to do Christmas villages that don’t involve a huge amount of room. "You do not have to have a dining table to be a collector anymore," promises Lee-Linehan. "You can literally have a nightstand and you can do something wonderful with that."

And, too, what goes in the villages is shifting a little. "I’ll see people searching for, like, a craft brewery," says Lee-Linehan. "I doubt that the older population is gonna have the hipster bar they’re gonna love. I might be generalizing! But they’re probably more into the wineries versus the craft breweries." In recent years, for instance, Lemax has made a yoga and pilates studio, a cheese festival and farmer’s market, and organic fruit market. "We’re seeing people wanting that. And then it’s actually moving in stores."

Take a recent TikTok video that has amassed more than 12 million views. It featured a young woman (a content creator who goes by Amanda Guido), announcing that she’d decided to continue her mom’s tradition of building a Christmas village. Hers wasn’t the Our Town or the Christmas Carol look of the 1990s; there was nothing Norman Rockwell about it. It was an all-in-one kit in a simple white ceramic—helpfully linked on her Amazon page—a distinctly Instagram-era spin on the practice. Minimalist, even. But it was definitely a Christmas village. Maybe one day we’ll get that modernist one, after all.

Images courtesy of Lemax and Department 56.

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