When the Yowies Came to the Christmas Village

The Christmas village in our household took on a few forms but nothing like this year…with Yowies???

Forgetting the yowies for a second, I should tell the history of our Christmas Village.

As far back as I can remember, my dad was the main person behind the village, putting the plastic houses together, laying the train track down, fiddling with the switch till it ran the train correctly, and then letting me play with it for hours. In the first years, it was a small oval track, on a medium sized platform, with a train station, a white house under a green roof (It was the hotel in Petticoat Junction in my imagination), a red schoolhouse, a white church with a blue roof and a bell in its steeple, a barn with a red roof, some animals, a grey diner with a yellow roof, and a few cardboard houses with glitter on them. The village was set under the Christmas tree in the living room.

In later years, when my parents expanded the house some, the platform under the tree grew to a large platform, and the number of houses grew when my mom got a kit to make her own cardboard houses. She added a few bits and pieces and it so became that my dad got the job of the train, and mom kind of took over the village part.

Then the shops started to display lovely made houses, realistic with all kinds of accessory pieces. My mom started collecting them and she started getting some lovely additions as gifts.

After my dad passed away (sadly, while taking down the train set), Mom gave the train set to Roger, and then moved the Christmas village to the top of the piano. She would spend weeks getting the set up just right. There were lights to deal with, fake snow, lamps, fencing, stone walls, cobbled streets…she had a great time with her village, and many times seemed swept away by it, lost in a winter wonderland of her own creation.

As she became older, she’d often shake her head and say, “I don’t know if I will get that village up this year.” But she said that as if she’d be very disappointed if she didn’t. So we would offer help. It began getting the boxes for her and then she could handle the rest. But gradually it was too much, the Christmas before she died, the rest of us did the whole thing. It was something I wanted her to have. Maybe she couldn’t do it, but she was going to have her village for sure!

The next Christmas, as much as I wanted to, the village didn’t go up. Instead her portrait sat on the piano, my only way to have mom with us at Christmas…

This last year though, I did want the children to have a village. Except this year I wasn’t up to much. So Miranda got me all the boxes in stages, and the children and I could build it together. What a time to cherish, remember mom, their Yaya, and seeing the magic that it created for us all.

It didn’t take us long to have the main parts of the village up and ready.

And perhaps things weren’t exactly as Yaya did them, but I thought it was taking shape rather nicely.

Silas was very excited about the village and asked to pose with it, something it doesn’t usually volunteer for much!

Things started to go odd when the children began working on the tree house (One of our combined favorite pieces of the village)…

Yowies started to appear in the Christmas Village….

What are Yowies, you might ask?

Yowie began as the brainchild of English-born advertising man, illustrator and author Geoff Pike. After serving in the navy, Pike jumped ship in Australia, finding work as a jackaroo on remote cattle stations. He became enchanted by Australia’s outback and its unique wildlife, and devoted his free time to nursing injured and orphaned animals back to health.

Many decades later, after a successful career in advertising, Pike drew on these early bush experiences and his love of wild places to create the Yowie Kingdom, a fictional magical realm free of the destructive influence of humanity, where threatened wildlife finds a safe haven.

After three years developing the characters and the manufacturing process, in 1997 Cadbury launched Yowie as a foil-wrapped character-shaped milk chocolate shell containing a plastic capsule. Within the capsule was a multi-part collectable model of a native Australian or New Zealand animal, together with a leaflet featuring information, a photo of the animal and assembly instructions for the collectable. The first series featured 50 animals.

As of July 2014 the first new Yowie products were on sale in the US. (Now found at Lolli and Pops in Annapolis Mall)

I just didn’t have the heart to tell the children that you wouldn’t find a numbat or a bilby on a frozen pond in the winter snow, ever.

They began to fill the tree-house with Yowies. What is remarkable to me is the history of the Yowies, were sent by John to MY children so many years ago, and now, OUR grandchildren were playing with them in my mom’s cherished Christmas village.

Where there is a sign that says “no girls allowed” no mention is made of Yowies, so, they have clearly taken over.

The blue fairy wren (Not a Yowie) was put in the top with the Yowie Cockatoo.

Loved the quoll hanging upside down.

So as silly as the Aussie animals looked in our white, snowy, Christmas village, I just giggled to myself, and let them create their own village magic. So worth all the work, as Silas, Rubí, and Ezra spent hours there, about as lost as I remember seeing mom sometimes…