christmas village recommendations - Classic Toy Trains Magazine

I like the Dept. 56 buildings more than the other brands. I can pretty much tell a Dept. 56 building at a glance from other brands by the difference in quality. But I have a fairly large collection of the buildings and if I am ever able to build a permanent layout, the buildings are going to be a major part of it.

Everyone else is correct in that you can find other brands for less money. The majority of people are going to look at your Christmas village and think it is neat and not be able to tell one brand from another or even care. You can have a very nice Christmas village for far less money if you use Lemax or big box/department store brands such as Home Depot, Lowes, or Kohls.

If you do get any Dept. 56 buildings, they have different themed "villages", such as North Pole, Christmas in the City, and Snow Village, plus a few others. The buildings have different architectural styles, and are also different scales. Snow Village is probably the most popular, I've heard mention that they scale better with O scale trains, and the buildings are larger than the Christmas in the City buildings. It probably looks better if you stay within one "village", but a mix can look nice, too. I don't know if Lemax or the other brands have different "villages" or not.

As mentioned, the people that come with the village buildings, or can be purchased as separate accessories, are way out of scale for O scale trains. But, if you aren't concerned with scale, the people do add a nice touch and they are easier to see than the scale, but comparatively little O scale people. I've seen neat Christmas Village layouts that are pretty much scale, but I've also seen some really neat layouts that have a real mish-mash of buildings and people and toys in all sorts of scales and from all sorts of manufacturers that are really charming. There really aren't any rules for setting up a train around a tree at Christmas.