PUTZES from 2007!
| NEW PUTZES 2003 |
| NEW PUTZES 2004 |
| NEW PUTZES,2005 |
| NEW PUTZES,2006 |
| NEW PUTZES,2008 |
| NEW PUTZES,2009 |
| BOOKS and MOVIES |
| MAIN PAGE |
| TABLE of CONTENTS |
Season's greetings Putz Collectors,
Though I don’t have as many houses as some of you, I am proudly sending along some photos of my collection. My village will stay high on shelves for a few years because I have a few small grandkids that will be staying in our home for a few days before Christmas. Need I say more?
As always I’ve been thoroughly enjoying all the emails that everyone sends back and forth within our collector’s club. I want to thank Maria for all her Putzy finds, as well as tips like using the Mister Clean Magic Sponge. I just bought the product yesterday and hope to brighten some filthy collectibles I recently picked up at a house sale.
Thank you to Aimee for sending photos of her houses and other wonderful creations at a craft/holiday show this fall. The display was beautiful! Thanks Robby and Howard for pictures of your displays. This is great fun for me and I hope more collectors will send their pictures out to all of us.
Most of all, thank you Ted, and all of your contributors, especially Tom for all the knowledge you share and all the warm fuzzy memories that come to mind after going to Papa Ted's Place.
So fellow collectors, may your days be "merry and bright". Have a healthy and happy holiday season.
Sincerely, - Dianne Gray
My goodness, Dianne! Nothing to apologize for, here. Quantity is no substitute for quality and everything I see is strictly "Top Drawer!" - PT
A putz with no houses?
This is just the "tip of the iceberg;" there is SO much more! Visit Antoinette's Home Page for a tour of her new and even more spectacular Mantel Panoramas for this year..
| *VISIT ANTOINETTE'S HOME PAGE* |
Hacienda Santa Windows:
I once put up a House of the Month because it had
the only "Santa Window" I'd ever seen, and it's still the only one I've got. Here,
Tom Hull, the "Hacienda King" has a whole putz full! Some of these even
have TWO- and he made of his own replacement windows on vellum paper to
complete some of them. But I'd rather let him tell his own story -
"Well here it is - the Santa window putz. There are six houses with the Santa windows in them. The first one I ever got was the Santa Castle with the little girl in front in the upper left corner. I had to get in there and fix the windows as they were both cracked. I glued a piece of tissue paper on the back side of each window. This necessitated taking the house off of the base so while there I removed the piece of cardboard separating the light from these windows. Originally only the upper portholes would have had light coming from them. The second house was one of two houses in a lot and those two are the smallest houses in front. Only the Santa window house is lit. It is VERY small indeed and has a stapled base much like Dolly Toy Co. houses and this is the original treatment. Notice on this houses litter mate that (in this instance) a hand painted brick work is apparent. Also the applied corner treatment and TWO doors - the right hand door partially covered by the applied corner stone work treatment. The house in the center I purchased this year just before the set of Santa window houses came up and it is the largest and perhaps most architecturally elaborate of all of the Santa Window houses. The remaining houses were from the set of seven houses that the had three Santa Window houses.
Thanks Janet for the neat trees with red berries in them - they look great. I still have two more putz's to put up so more later." - Tom Hull
Tom's Total Putzes for 2007:
These are the 13 pictures Tom sent me this year. This is putzing at its finest. I'm just going to let the pictures speak for themselves.
Hey, Tom - move the lamp!
Tom sez - "I finally have this putz up - it may never come down. There is some tweaking to do (like gluing the head back on a figurine and straighten the cross on the church) but I believe it is essentially all there. These are available light pictures. Starting with two overall views and followed by closer shots."
I know what you mean, Tom - Mine has been up in the living room for 15 years. But, oh - the dust!
VINTAGE
Unknown
Also unknown, but even humble COLMORS can have their magic in the right setting.
KARL FEY FIND
Karl found a family putz displayed in a family restaurant in southern New Jersey. Here are some pictures ....
"Discovered this wonderful collection in a local family-owned restaurant here in southern NJ. These houses have been in the family since they were purchased new by their great grandfather for their yearly Christmas train displays. Houses look to cover roughly a 15 year period(late 20's to just before the war.) Not only is the house collection completely intact, but all of the trains are also neatly preserved, but(unfortunately) not on display. Only had enough juice left in my camera to capture the most interesting houses.
Take special note: once again, these houses were purchased to go with THE TRAINS. When will the the TCA wake up and acknowledge the fact that THESE houses - not the pricey Lionel houses - were the mainstay of train layouts everywhere?" - Karl Fey
Is there any end to the variety of these things?
MORE MILLER BOY'S
I'm now continuing the series on the Miller Boys from Scranton, PA started in PUTZES 2005, - photos submitted two years ago by Donna Collins... photos contibuted by her relatives Clarence and Ruth Miller from the family archives. Another of their elaborate train displays.
There is no way of telling which display was the earlier - this one or the one depicted in PUTZES 2005, This one is much further along toward the scale realism burgeoning in the late '30s, but the trains on the tracks are earlier Lionel true tinplate models. The track plan - though complicated with lots of switches and even a home-built roundtable is actually not as clever and would have been geared more toward switching and siding operations than for continous running.
This was obviously a family that had loved trains for quite a long time. The engines seen parked on the roundtable sidings are Lionel boxcab electric styles of the latter 1920s - a #251 and a #253. The steamer is a type #263E 0 ga. "Baby Blue Comet" engine, and was a two-tone robbin's egg and dark blue. All three engines are the earlier stamped-steel types, and not the die-cast realistic-looking steamer seen on the PUTZES 2005 layout, which types most people think of when they think of Lionel, but which only actually began to appear just on the threshold of WW II.
It's a real mixture of new scale modeling and funny old things, isn't it? You've really got to admire the work that went into everything we see here. Karl Fey says he recognizes the church from plans in the Lionel Service Manual. Balsa and cardboard 0 scale building kits were also widely available in the hobby stores of those times. The Miller Boys must have started on this one around the 4th of July.
PUTZES, PUTZES- Everywhere!
Joye Smith has kind of reversed the tradition. Instead of the putz being the centerpiece of Christmas, she has set them up in every nook and cranny - rather more like an Easter egg hunt.
On the stairwell!
I can't explain the rest of these, but they're all pretty. Just enjoy.
Isn't this cute? You don't have to be "mega" to be "magic."
THE GREAT WALL OF PUTZ!
Carol Shroads has done a thing here that mixes putzing with the paper-mountain formation I have seen on a lot of train setups.
Rather amazing effort here, isn't it? This thing is rather large, and sort of a vertical train layout in its scope and scale ...
ON THE SUBJECT
OF TREES...
in other days ...
It's ironic that that this is exactly what we were looking for back in the old days. The perfect tree. Thick and conical - all around. Of course, we never found it. We always came home with some rangey, malformed thing with one side we had to turn to the wall. With big voids and open spaces where ornaments hung free like shining planets in a celestial realm of shining tinsel- where great, rangey branches spurted out like clouds of cosmic magellenic dust amid a galaxy of untold wonder. The sort trees you see in the old photos on this website, and it the fine old movies. The George Bailey tree in "Wonderful Life" is my kind of tree. Oh, how I miss them, those wonderful imperfect trees, with their grand open voids!!
This is my Mom, playing Santa past midnight on Christmas Eve 1953. The place is Russell, Kansas. In that time and in that place the selection of trees available was appalling. They came down, somehow, through Nebraska from somewhere God intended trees should never grow. This was one of the better ones ...
.... and this was one of the worst. 1952. We called it the "United States Tree" because it was shaped like the United States with "New England" thrusting defiantly out to the right and just as undefeatable. My little brother Tim is standing smack in front of "Florida" - and believe me, there was a "Florida" kind of thing hanging down. Mom cried over that tree. Things were so bad in Russell she actually got Dad to drive her to nearby Hays City and this was still the best she could do.
These photos were taken with a flash which makes the tree look really extra bad - the hardest thing in the world to photograph is a Christmas tree -but in the dark it was magic. Do we look unhappy? That's me in the middle, by the way. I was 11, here - Jim 7, and Tim 4.
Everyplace I've gone in recent years, every tree I've seen has been so much the same. No character. No individuality perceiveable without a guide book. Just uniform cones with Chinese junk all over. And God spare me from another "theme" tree! Christmas must be ecclectic, a compilation of a hodgepodge of historical stuff that was the history of you - and the family that went before. Christmas doesn't work if you try to impose your will upon it, if you try to direct it like a movie and make it go your way. You will miss the serendipity, the miracles. Like the old Christmas tree that you could get, take Christmas as it comes. Just let it have its way. God Bless you in the coming New Year. - PT
|
announcements, will remain exactly as Ted left it in October, 2012. The archive is kept online with the help of volunteers from:
|
