Ideas for How to Set Up a Department 56 Halloween Village
- 1). Clear any items from the surface on which you are putting the village. Choose a shelf, a table or a fire mantle. Cover the surface with a green tablecloth or a piece of fabric to represent grass.
- 2). Place your non-Halloween Department 56 houses and accessories in a group, and group separately any Halloween houses and accessories that you have. Select five key pieces around which to build your village. These might include the "Candy Caldron" and "Rickety Railroad Station" Halloween buildings, the "Haunted Rails Dining car" Halloween accessory and "Molly O'Brien's Irish Pub" from the Cityscapes collection.
- 3). Sketch a layout for your village. It doesn't have to be to scale as long as the sizes of the table, houses and accessories are relevant to each other. Draw in where you will place your five key pieces, and the roads and streets between them.
- 4). Place the five key pieces on the table and create the roads and streets from your plan. Draw cobblestones on brown craft paper with a brown marker for the streets. Create any wide streets for vehicles from gray construction paper. Cut out the appropriate road and street shapes and place them on the green base.
- 5). Select other houses and buildings from your collection and place them on the table. Experiment with the arrangement. Use Styrofoam blocks or books covered with a piece of fabric to create height for some of the buildings. Mix large and small buildings together to add interest. Include some lighted buildings. From the Halloween collection, these include the "Grimsly Retirement Home," "Walter & Larry's Crypt," "Rusty's Used Cars" and "The Voodoo Lounge."
- 6). Place some figures in the village. Use figures from your regular collection as well as Halloween characters such as "Count Dogula" and the "Trick-Or-Treating At The Castle" figures. Position the figures and the buildings so that they tell a Halloween story.
- 7). Add additional lighting to the scene. Replace the white light bulb in a small lamp with an orange one, and place the lamp to one side of the table. It will not be part of the village scene but will cast an eerie glow onto it.
- 8). Place small pumpkins and gourds along the sides of the table, mantle or shelf to highlight the village. Pull very small strands of cobweb mesh and hang them over the buildings and trees in the village.
- 9). Place a CD player or mp3 player near the display and play a recording of scary Halloween sounds and music. Unfortunately, Department 56 has discontinued all the Halloween houses that produce scary sounds.
- 10
Add a scent to the village by placing some pumpkin spice or apple cider potpourri in a small bowl and hiding it at the back of the display.
