Need Ideas For Displaying Your Department 56 Village?

Tired of displaying your Department 56 village pieces on a table or mantel? Well check out a few of our display ideas we used in our store, The Jolly Christmas Shop.

National Lampoons Christmas Vacation Village Display

To start we found an old wooden ladder at a garage sale. This ladder actually only cost us $10! Next we went to the hardware store and purchased shelf boards around 3/4" thick. Before we purchased these boards, we measured the width of the rungs of the ladder and made sure we purchased the right width board (the length won't matter since each board will be cut). Next we measured how long we wanted each shelf board. We knew we wanted the boards staggered in length, with the shortest at the top. Depending on the height of your ladder you may be able to fit more boards, we could only fit 3. We also didn't want the last board to be too low to the ground (too tempting for little hands to touch). We cut each board, each a little shorter than the next. Since our boards were unpainted, we painted ours white. You may want to stain or paint your boards another color. We liked ours white and thought the white made it look like snow. Once your boards are dry, place them on the rungs. If the boards are sitting a little uneven, use some wooden shims underneath the shelf boards. Next to secure our shelves we added screws through the shelf board and right into the wood on the rungs of the ladder (if the screws are shown, add a little paint to cover them up). Next, the fun part, start placing the houses. We usually start with big pieces first and then add the little pieces scattered around. To make the pieces really secure, we add a little hot glue to the bottom of the pieces and stick it to the board. Be sure the hot glue does not touch any paper tags underneath the village pieces, the glue will tear off the tags. When you're ready to put away your village at the end of the year, the hot glue will peel off of the bottoms fairly easily. After we added all the figures, we added C7 color bulbs all around the ladder. We made it look like a handy man, like Clark Griswold was setting up his lights up and entangled them all around the ladder! We then added our moose mug lights around the middle shelf. We hope you enjoyed this look!

You can purchase all Christmas Vacation Village pieces and lights in the Christmas Vacation section of our site Click Here