About 300 people roam the Christmas Carnival grounds, grabbing mugs of eggnog, gawking at the dinosaur exhibit and whirling through the air on its many rides; but every so often Dan Savage scoops up a few and drops them into a different part of the park.
Christmas is definitely the Savages’ favorite holiday. Their house, by far the most decorated on the block, is done up to such a degree inside and out that their neighbors have dubbed them the Griswolds, after the classic holiday movie “National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation.”
So it stands to reason that a Christmas village — a staple of the holiday season — filled with tiny, rosy-cheeked, Dickensian figures moving about tiny ceramic buildings arranged just so on big swaths of fluffy batting would have a place in their home. Not quite.
“I wanted to do something where people come in and go ‘Whoa,’ something fun to watch,” he said. “You can just set up a bunch of villages, then go ‘cute’ ya know?”
When Savage set out to capture the essence of the holiday season in miniature, he wanted something more dynamic.
The result is an impressive combination of whirling and swinging carnival rides, tiny food booths, shops and a dinosaur exhibit, surrounded by snowy trees, separated by light-lined cobblestone paths and wrapped with looming, snow-capped mountains. The scene fills a 4 1/2 -foot by 11-foot nook just off their living room. To take it all in at once is nearly impossible — there are just too many tiny details on every surface, too many little interactions going on between the people roaming the grounds. To see it all requires leaning in and looking closely, one interaction at a time.
Savage was looking to impress, and so far he is getting the reaction he was hoping for.
“We’ve had neighbors come here and stand for 20 minutes, going ‘Oh, my gosh,’ just watching,” he said.
“Our neighbor came over to see it and when she came around the corner she went ‘Holy crap … ho-lee crap.'”
“She just kept saying it over and over,” said Dan’s wife Tiffany Savage, while wearing a red sweater and Christmas-light earrings. “Everyone’s very amazed at how much it’s grown and how interactive it is.”
Savage always had a thing for buildings and scenes at scale. As a boy, he used shoebox lids pasted with cutouts from Sears catalogs as stand-ins for building fronts in his sandbox. But when it came to Christmas, neither his nor his wife’s parents were into decorating for the holidays. As a single guy in the mid-90s, he began collecting Christmas buildings, starting with two little shops that he still has today. His interests quickly shifted when companies started producing tiny, limited-release, highly-detailed animated carnival rides.
Last year, the collection was about a third of the size it is today and proudly displayed in the family living room. After browsing the internet, though, Savage decided to go big.
He spent the better part of a year scouring the web for more people, rides and Christmas buildings to build out his carnival. Sometimes by luck, other times by lots of searching, he gathered bumper cars, a carousel and hot air balloons, until he built his collection to include 14 rides and 24 buildings. Savage also hand-built many of the elements that all tie together. The mountains are carved from a pink Styrofoam sheet. They and the trees (also handmade) are painted with a thick, fluffy snow of Savage’s secret recipe. The lights lining the stone paths are globe-bulb Christmas lights run through painted milkshake straws; the fence lining the front of the display is a combination of saw dust, rain gutter mesh, wooden dowels and a baseboard moulding strip. Perhaps his proudest feature is the dinosaur exhibit. Savage sculpted and painted faux-sandstone walls encasing the tiny walk-in exhibit of dinosaurs standing in fierce poses behind a tiny black fence.
Savage is satisfied with the carnival he created, but he’s already planning to build another 3-by-3-foot addition. The expansion will likely feature a skating rink and an outdoor movie theater that will actually play seasonal favorites.
“I’ll probably get started in March or April,” he said. “I like to get it going early … I’m not the type to start in November because I don’t want to be rushed.”
