It takes a village

WASILLA — For Dawn Baker, Christmas starts in the middle of November.

That’s because the Christmas Village Baker puts together at her thrift store in Wasilla takes three weeks to build.

“I’ve been collecting for about nine years and I have well over 1,000 pieces,” Baker said. “It’s 130 square feet of Christmas Village.”

She said she gets the pieces from garage sales and thrift stores. People also give them to her.

“It’s just something that I’ve always done. I used to do this when my kids were little,” she said. “I had to leave one in Georgia when I moved up here 10 years ago and I re-started nine years ago.”

She began small with just a few pieces atop her television. Then it moved from the television to the dining room table. Three years ago, she opened up Happy Dawn’s Thrift Shop — she said a lot of people only know her as Happy Dawn — in a warehouse at the corner of Nelson Avenue and Main Street. Now she has all kinds of space for what she calls her yearly toys.

“I get to play with them once a year, and it makes my day for someone to come in and see it and go, ‘Wow I haven’t seen these in years.’”

Setting the village up in the store, she said, is much better than doing it at home.

“When it was at home only really family got to see it,” Baker said. “It’s very nice to be able to share it with a lot of folks.”

Baker said she’s got ice skaters in the village, along with a sporting goods store, petting zoo, a ski area and a section she refers to as “Santa Land.” There’s even a cluster of camper trailers.

“I’m from the south you’ve got to have a trailer park,” Baker said.

She said some of the pieces light up and some play music. She’s named some of the buildings after her grandchildren and has incorporated memorabilia from her favorite Florida Gators football team. She also scatters familiar characters — Cat in the Hat, a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle — here and there. Kids seem to get a kick out of spotting them.

One thing she doesn’t have is a train. People ask her about that all the time, but there’s a reason she doesn’t have one. Baker said she builds her village on top of Styrofoam. It’s easier to run wires up to the various pieces that way, but trains don’t like Styrofoam. They tend to de-rail.

“I tried it and it didn’t work very well,” Baker said.

She said that as word of her work has spread, it’s to the point now where she has customers who come in just to look at the village. She said she keeps it up through mid-January.

“That way if someone is gone during Christmas vacation or whatever they can see it,” she said. “They’ll come in and say, ‘You still got your village up? We’ve brought so-and-so from somewhere.’”

She said anyone and everyone is invited to the store to see it. That’s really the point of spending so much time on it.

“The more people we can get that know it’s here the better it is. It’ll just put everybody in a little bit of a Christmas mood,” Baker said.

Contact Andrew Wellner at andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com or 352-2269.