Lego sets bring a multigenerational flavour to Christmas village displays

When Eileen Nurse was a kid, her family would decorate the mantle above the fireplace with miniature houses and fake trees every December, creating a little winter scene. So when Nurse, now 61, bought her first Christmas-themed Lego set in 2010, a new tradition was born.

"This is kind of my homage to my growing up and my mom and dad, in particular my dad, who loved doing that," said Nurse, who lives in Chilliwack, B.C. 

Since Nurse bought her first set, her Christmas setup has snowballed. She says she's bought all the holiday-themed sets.

Each year she builds the set starting shortly after Remembrance Day, and disassembles it after the holidays so she can start from scratch the next year.

She spreads her build across a couple of foldable tables with a white tablecloth. Her village has sections such as a commercial area, then a section for Santa and the North Pole, assuming her cats don't destroy it.

"Somewhere in it I try to fit the Home Alone house but that is really big. So sometimes it's a little hard and the scale is a little off on that one," said Nurse. 

And she's far from the only one. Many people across Canada and beyond are building and sharing their Lego creations online, which include sophisticated landscaping, human-sized mountain slopes, and functioning holiday trams.

Graeme Dymond uses Duplo, the larger version of Lego made for toddlers, to make a Christmas display every year in his front yard, along with his own winter village.

"Just about every Lego convention that I go to around the world [there] are people who have Christmas villages or holiday-themed builds on display," said Dymond, a Lego-certified professional and the organizer of the Lego fan convention, Bricks in the Six in Mississauga, Ont. 

The Lego Company has capitalized on this trend, designing sets specifically to fit into Christmas village displays, such as an alpine ski lodge, a toy shop, and even the house from the holiday movie Home Alone.

Each year the company comes up with a new holiday-themed set — but many of them are only in production for a limited time before being discontinued, and those sets have ballooned in price, due to their rarity.

"A good holiday set captures the essence of the season," said Chris McVeigh, a Canadian Lego designer currently living in Denmark, who has designed two of the Lego Company's holiday sets. 

"It should give a sense of nostalgia, wonder and feel like home."

McVeigh has added some of that nostalgia right from his own childhood. In the Santa's Visit Lego set from 2021, he added holiday cookies that looked just like the ones his mother makes at Christmas.