Village to rally spirit of giving

Connie Palazzolo looks hunger in the eye six times a month when she volunteers at the food bank in Hopelink's Carnation office. Each holiday season, she helps desperate parents when they go into the gift room, seeking a little something for their teenager or toddler.

It takes a village, said the Duvall woman, to feed, clothe and provide gifts for the needy. That's why Palazzolo will welcome strangers to her own village this weekend and next. Visitors will be able to view her Christmas Village, a collection of more than 100 miniature buildings with thousands of accessories from cows to ice skaters to espresso carts. Admission to the display — and her home — will be donations of nonperishable food or new, unwrapped gifts and clothing for Hopelink.

"They need the donations," Palazzolo said. "Everything from food to dog food to baby products, but particularly gifts for teenagers."

Palazzolo began collecting the popular Department 56-brand pieces in 1979 when a friend in California sent her a country-style church. She was so taken with the lighted ceramic piece that she began purchasing the colorful buildings in the collection.

It was a real snow-covered church and small-town buildings that inspired a group of friends to start Department 56 in Minnesota. They drove through a charming town one winter day and were smitten by the traditional, Christmas-card look. They re-created it in miniature and began selling Department 56 pieces in 1976.

Palazzolo focuses on the original line, although the company now produces several heritage series such as Dickens' Village, Alpine Village, Little Town of Bethlehem and North Pole/Santa's Workshop.

Palazzolo, a former Mercer Island resident and former travel agent, displays her collection in her Duvall living room. She sets up banquet tables and card tables and puts a piece of plywood over the couch. A Styrofoam base is covered with fake snow. The main display takes up the entire center of the room, with space to walk around. A village resort, which includes a ski hill and an ice-fishing pond, sits across the aisle atop an organ. A snow castle and a king and queen in a sleigh have a separate place of honor under a window, and a choir nestles on a hutch shelf.

Indeed, the size of the living room was the final selling point when she and her brother bought the Duvall house in 2001.

"My brother wanted a place with land, and I wanted a place capable of displaying and storing my village," she said. "We got both."

Palazzolo begins unpacking the pieces in October. The display is a work in progress, she said, and she expects to be rearranging parts of the village Saturday morning. This year's show focuses on a central town square complete with ice skaters on a frozen fountain, a courthouse, police station, candy shop and diner. From there it spreads to the suburbs and farmland.

She points out that the doctor's residence is next to the hospital, which isn't far from the Ronald McDonald House, a piece she won in a drawing.

On a nearby hill, in the middle of the village, is a house with a large treehouse.

"That's where I live," said her brother, Leo Nienstadt.

A tiny ceramic black Lab sits at the ladder leading up to the treehouse. Nienstadt's black Labs follow him as he walks around the village display — one dog helps himself to a piece of fake snow that Nienstadt later returns.

Palazzolo jokes that she lives in a nearby house. Their sister, Alice Hrneir, who lives with them in real life and also volunteers at the food bank, has picked out a different village house as her home.

Hrneir, Palazzolo said, is a key helper in setting up the show.

"I have to get underneath the table and poke my fingers through the holes for the wiring," Palazzolo said. "Alice has to watch and make sure I get the right hole."

She proudly displays a Habitat for Humanity building, being worked on by miniature volunteers.

"The only thing my village doesn't have," she said, "is a food bank."

Maybe, she added, in an imaginary world, they don't need food banks.

Sherry Grindeland: 206-515-5633 or sgrindeland@seattletimes.com