Christmas

From Arte en la Charreria we moved on to Christmas.  All I know is that last year setting up the Bonnie Moran North Pole Village took almost the entire month.  Stephanie and I were prepared to work.  We took a day to get all the buildings, figures and accessories from Mrs. Moran’s house.  We got the Styrofoam from our storage facility and began sorting.  Last year we took everything out of the boxes, laid them out and then started to assemble.  We decided to try a different tactic this year.  Stephanie and I grouped buildings together.  They were loose groupings but they helped:  commercial, industrial, entertainment, food, etc.  We then picked an “area” to start with and moved out from there.  The first day, I have to say is the hardest because you kind of just stand there staring, asking yourself what on earth you can do.  There was a lot of pressure, too, because Mrs. Moran wasn’t going to be helping us as much this year.  She said she trusted us.  Eek!  Once we got started though, Stephanie and I and some of the part time/student workers knocked it out in a week.  A week!!  We worked hard but it was done.  I was shocked at how quickly we got it done.  We then figured out where to store all the empty boxes and extra Styrofoam.  Last year we had snowflakes under the acrylic lids.  This year we put Christmas presents under them.  We wrapped the empty village boxes and used them as the presents.  We stored most of the empty boxes under the tables and the rest with the extra Styrofoam went in a corner behind our moveable walls.  It was a good thing nobody moved the walls because they would have had a Styrofoam avalanche on their hands!  Mrs. Moran was thrilled with how the village turned out.  Stephanie had put some skiers on the mountain backdrops and Mrs. Moran loved that idea.  She wondered why she never thought of it.  People had to get used to the idea that we put it in the middle of the room this year rather than against a wall.  It’s funny how even after only one-year people get used to something and complain when it’s different.  Overall, the exhibit was a huge hit again.

The tear down of the exhibit was, once again a challenge.  I’m not really sure how to make it any easier.  Last year we took all the houses off and put them on different tables with the figures all on one table.  I did put the figures on one table but as I got boxes out I was mostly aware of where all the houses were so I would match up houses and boxes as I went.  Once I could reach/find the plug to unplug them I would set the house with the box and move on to the next.  Judy, our Assistant Educator was nice enough to figure out how to get the house in the box.  We had a pretty good system going.  Honestly the hardest part was figuring out how to unplug everything.  And don’t forget about unwrapping the “presents”, which I thought would be fun…yeah.  But we got it down in a week.  Mrs. Moran is allowing us to store the houses with the Styrofoam this year so we bought some new shelving for our South Storage area and the shelving holds everything Christmas.  It looks like it will work out nicely.