Even as an old fart, I embrace the holidays: decorating the Christmas tree, hanging stockings, and scattering poinsettias around the house. It is great fun to identify the best family photos of the year as we piece together the annual holiday greeting card, to rediscover the works of music that will be forgotten through the seasons to come, and to sneak Frangos out of the cupboard before dinner. But the moment each December to which I look forward the most is when I get to unpack the Village People and set them out on the credenza.

Village People is the term I coined to describe the table top diorama of miniature lighted buildings and the figures that populate the region they define, comprised of a set of such things we acquired over a period of several years. I was admiring them again last night and decided their attraction is due in large measure to my having been an avid builder of models when I was a boy.

My youth was the heyday of Ed Roth, and it is surprising as I poke around the internet while writing this to discover Revell still makes some of the Kustom Kulture kits I was gluing together decades ago. I spent hours at the age of 10 or 11 stringing the rigging on a 1∶220 model of the Cutty Sark, imagining myself participating in its famous 1872 Shanghai–to–London race with the Thermopylae. Model building gave me an opportunity to spend time with my grandfather — a stoic Swede and good at it — in his wood shop building a wall‐mounted stand for the 1∶144 model of the Saturn V rocket I assembled when I was about 13 years old. (The Saturn stood 363 feet tall, so imagine how large even a 1/144 scale version was.) My Dad’s stories about his adventures in the Civil Air Patrol inspired me to put together a balsa wood model of a Piper Cub when I was perhaps 15 years old. And my brothers and I spent countless days fashioning an HO scale railroad layout.

Many years later in fair round belly with good capon lined, I confess no small amount of nostalgia for the hours spent as a boy creating representations of the things that fascinated and amazed me. I learned how to build airplanes, and space ships, and sailing ships, and cars, and railroads, and … well, at least in boyish flights of fancy, those were the things I learned. In truth I learned a great deal about concentration, attention to detail, improvisation, craftsmanship, and the satisfaction that comes with finishing a thing. I also learned a lifelong habit of interest in how all things work. The Village People are a totem of that childhood. They animate memories of which I am particularly fond and ironically make me mindful of Disneyland’s Main Street, about which Umberto Eco once noted, (W)e not only enjoy a perfect imitation, we also enjoy the conviction that imitation has reached its apex and afterwards reality will always be inferior to it.

We had to quit adding to our Village People collection as we were running out of room for them and were not interested in having a set of Megalopolis People. I suppose we could start a new village on the opposite side of the room, but then we would have to set up some sort of diplomatic service to negotiate trade agreements, arrange prisoner exchanges, and so on, and that just seems like too much work. We will instead be content with the Village People we have, which is fine, as they amply supply the frisson of anticipation the holidays are expected to deliver.