The Enchanted Village - part 1

In a previous post, "Chestnuts bursting out the oven door", I mentioned The Enchanted Village display at Jordan's Furniture in Avon. MA, one of six locations for the chain. I said we'd like to get back there and take our cameras this time. Well, we did it a couple of days ago. Here are some of the pictures we took at that time.

The first picture is the first scene you see as you arrive. Notice the old papers. It's easy to see that some are The Boston Globe, a paper company that still exists but some appear to be The Lowell Sunday Telegraph (or is it The Lowell Sun and Telegraph?). There is a still a Lowell Sun but I don't think The Telegraph exists in Lowell. There is a Nashua (NH) Telegraph, though. It would take some research to figure out what the story is there. But you can see how yellow and brittle the newspapers seem to be. It just points out the difficulty of preserving and maintaining the entire display. Everything else appears in really good shape. But newspapers must be more difficult to preserve.

The next picture shows a soda fountain. This is where I started to get hungry as we viewed the exhibit. They did an especially good job of preserving the food in these scenes. I'm not sure how active the soda fountain would have been in the winter (with as much snow around as they show) but I suppose you would miss having a frappe during the long New England winter. What's that, you say, it looks like the children are having a milk shake? Well, in Massachusetts, they are called a frappe - or at least they used to. Now, you can order a milkshake and get ice cream in it like the rest of the country. When I first moved here (in 1978) and ordered a milk shake, I only got milk with a flavoring added. I had to order a frappe to get ice cream, too.

The last picture for today is the scene that inspired my bursting chestnuts story in my "Chestnuts bursting out the oven door" post. I didn't do a very good job of getting the roasting chestnuts in the picture. The roaster is the upright metal barrel with wheels. I was more focused on the Basset Hound sitting with the boy doing the roasting. The boy does have a bag of roasted chestnuts ready to sell, though. Or maybe he is just going to share them with his dog. I would have bought a bag if they were real and for sale. We still haven't been brave enough to try it at home. We still have the chestnuts, though, and it's just a matter of time.

I hope to have two more posts in the future with more pictures from The Enchanted Village.

[Update: The next set of pictures can be found in my post "The Enchanted Village - part 2" and the third, and final set, can be found in my post "The Enchanted Village - part 3"]