YouTube Videos with Lemax and Department 56 Villages

Christmas Village Displays

The following seasonal YouTube videos have been carefully chosen to provide you with inspiration and ideas when planning your Christmas village layout. They show you how to successfully build a tiered layout with platforms, incorporate mountains, achieve natural landscaping and hide your lighting cables and wires with ease.

Each of the videos shows how the design of a village can be very individual and unique, despite using identical or similar elements. You can watch how some of the displays take shape from rather humble beginnings, all the way to their professional appearance at the end, especially when the lights in each of the houses are switched on.


A comprehensive demonstration showing how to transform a plastic mountain supplied by My Village into an imaginative winter-themed landscape.




The making of an enormous and quite exceptional Christmas village from the planning stage and building the platforms, right up to switching on the lights at night.



A useful tutorial showing how a design is conceived and laid out, with invaluable suggestions and top tips along the way, helping to improve the realism factor of any display.



A lengthy and quite exhaustive crafting demonstration showing how to build a solid landscaped display for collectable Christmas houses, using model scenery and woodland elements.



A simple yet effective layout beneath a Christmas tree, complete with miniature railway running around the edge of the village itself.



An extremely elaborate layout with huge attention to detail around every corner, from roads with model cars to fully lit houses, fronted by hedges, pathways, trees and snowmen. The houses originate from a number of different companies, with the bulk of the collection being made up of Department 56 buildings.



The making of a small Christmas village, step by step, showing the careful positioning of each element before the welcomed addition of snow and the placing of the figurines. At the end of the video, the lights in the room are dimmed and the illuminations begin.



This video concentrates on the making of a large miniature Christmas village from unpacking the Lemax houses from their boxes and building the platforms, to positioning the electrical wires, laying the model railway line and general landscaping.



A large completed display, with a number of moving elements, including a sledding corkscrew mountain, a windmill with rotating sails, and flashing lights, while porcelain houses are laid out in lines, along streets. A train winds its way around the village, remaining hidden from view for much of its route.



A Victorian-style arrangement, incorporating numerous Department 56 buildings purchased from the Dickens series.



A spectacular and very professional appearing landscape, created using mainly Department 56 elements. This Christmas collection started its life in 1976 and has gradually grown over the following years to become more of a large town than a small village.



This Department 56 Christmas village is possibly the largest display in the world and took more than 50 hours to be laid out and arranged. As the video moves along the table, you will see scenes from cities, palaces, waterfronts, countryside landscaping and plenty of moving elements.



A relatively small village arrangement when compared to some of these other videos, this layout shows that you don't need hundreds of lit houses to create something quite magical.



This layout features a number of animated fairground pieces, such as a roundabout, chair swings, a spinning teacup ride and a traditional Ferris wheel.



A video showing a Christmas layout very much based around a model railway, with several trains, a large model zoo, miniature fairground and plenty of other moving pieces, including a hot-air balloon and cable cars heading up and down a snowy ski slope.