An act of recollection
Visiting friends enjoy Tammy’s train set, Yorktown, Virginia, December 2009.
“The Polar Express was the easiest of my picture book manuscripts to write… Once I realized the train was going to the North Pole, finding the story seemed less like a creative effort than an act of recollection. I felt, like the story’s narrator, that I was remembering something, not making it up.” — Chris Van Allsburg
If you’ve read Van Allsburg’s wonderful book (which is far more appealing than the movie that was inspired by it) you can probably identify with his description of that magical sense of “remembering” something that was purely fantasy, as if it has really happened. I don’t know why trains in particular seem to go so well with Christmas, but there’s probably more than one reason why so many people set up toy train sets during the holidays.
Another favorite at Christmas is the imaginary Christmas village. I have a tiny one that I seldom set up anymore, but I love seeing them in shops and especially in people’s homes. The author of one of the blogs I follow has posted a detailed tour of her own Christmas village, so we can enjoy this magical miniature world through her efforts; see her video embedded below. Thanks to Chris Van Allsburg, Ingrid Schlueter and others who understand that we can travel in our imagination to places unavailable to us by any other road.
One year ago today
This post was first published seven years ago today. The original post, comments and photo are linked, along with two other related posts, below. These links to related posts, and their thumbnail photos, do not appear in the blog feed; they are only visible when viewing the individual posts by clicking on each one. I have no idea why, nor do I know how they choose the related posts. That’s just the way WordPress does things.
- Posted in: Uncategorized
- Tagged: children, Christmas, enchantment, fun, imagination, memories, miniature worlds, Polar Express, toys, train set, villages
Defeat Despair 