What’s Happening?

 

After a couple of meeting cancellations due to bad weather, our club was finally able to meet for the first time in 6 months at the end of March.  That was also our Annual General Meeting and you can read all about what happened here.

Our May meeting is just a few days away.  There will be a White Elephant sale and a presentation from Vintage Villages, a Toronto based store that connects sellers and buyers of Department 56 and Lemax products.  So, that is going to be a fun meeting and can’t wait!

The club executives are also hard at work in planning a special summer meeting.  The fact that more than half of the scheduled meetings were cancelled in the previous fiscal year was unprecedented.  So stay tuned for more details regarding “Christmas in July”.

Just so you know, I have updated the list of web sites on the left panel of the main page and included The Village Chronicler.  This site has tons of information on Department 56 and its products.  The owner of the site is also a well known collector among the Department 56 collectible circle.  Have a look around the site and I hope you enjoy what you see.

With the amount of rain lately in the Greater Toronto area, I sure hope that we will have lots of May flowers blooming soon

It’s Almost Halloween!

Time flies, doesn't it?  We are only a week away from Halloween.   Are you all set decorating your home for the occasion?   If not, it is never too late, right?   But if you need some inspirational help, here is your chance.   Our club member Cheryl T. has just uploaded her “Halloweentown” video for 2018.   You can watch the video here and enjoy many of her wonderful display ideas.

By the way, I have recently come across a web site called “Find My Department 56” that is a great resource for Department 56 collectors.   This web site not only provides detailed information, such as year of release, year of retirement (if applicable), original retail sale price, for most (if not all) Department 56 items from the Village, Snowbabies and Snowbunnies collections, it also shows the number of active eBay auction listings for each item and the number of completed eBay auctions for that item in the past 90 days.  For collectors who are actively buying and/or selling on eBay, this web site provides valuable information such as the high, low and average price for which an item was sold.
  
In case you don’t realize, there is a section called “Useful Web Sites” on the left panel (just above the Hit counter).  I have listed there a number of web sites I believe are of interest to Department 56 collectors.   And if you know of any other similar web sites, please let me know and I will add your suggestion to this section as well.

Happy New Year!

is here!  Wishing you and yours a very happy and healthy new year!

It has been awhile since this blog site was updated.   Guess it is better late than never, right?  For the next few days, I will add new contents to this site.

So stay tuned.  Just wait and see what is in store for you!

By the way, our annual Christmas/holiday brunch is this Sunday January 8th at our usual favourite Chinese buffet restaurant: the Mandarin restaurant at 238 Biscayne Crescent, Brampton, Ontario.   Our members will gather at around 11:30am.   Hope everyone can come and join us for a nice social get-together as well as a delicious meal.

It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas …

With snow falling in Toronto today, the anticipation for Christmas is definitely growing stronger.   After all, we are only a month away from the “Big Day”.   Have you gotten your shopping done yet?   No, not I.   I have not even finished updating this blog site

But at least the following updates on this site have been completed:

• if you missed our September Halloween meeting, here is your chance to catch up by going to the Past Meeting Highlights page – our display contest entries are absolutely scccaaarrrryyyy!
• our November Christmas meeting is taking place tomorrow and meeting agenda can be found here 
• I have re-arranged our member display photographs and have added a display video from Cheryl T. to our Club Member Displays page - watch out for more updates on this page
• Martha and Barry have been putting out great newsletters for our club, you can find the latest editions here
• a new Department 56 gathering is being planned for San Antonio, Texas in 2014, click here for more details

 
In case you don’t know, our club is planning the annual holiday brunch in January 2014.  If you are interested to join us, send us an email (tvcc@rogers.com) for details.  2014 is appearing to be a busy year for our club as we are celebrating a milestone – we will be 20 years old in April.  We are planning to celebrate this special occasion … stay tuned for more details! 

By the way, Department 56 announced its annual product retirement lists on November 1st.  If you have not seen the list yet, make sure you visit Department 56’s web site to find out which items are set for retirement on December 26,2013.

Spring is in the air, at last!

March certainly went out like a lion.  Although we still see the occasional snow in the air, we can definitely feel that spring is upon us.  With cool sunny weather interrupted by rain showers here and there, the temperature in the city has finally reached double digits.

As for our club, spring is also the time for our “renewal” or “rejuvenation”.   Every year, our members gather at our March meeting to review our past 12 months’ activities, hold elections for outgoing executive members and look forward for new and exciting events during the Annual General Meeting.  For more details of our AGM and our March meeting that took place a couple of weeks ago, please visit this link.

In case you have not noticed, our March-April 2011 newsletter is now available online.  You can view it here.

And for those readers who are not members of this club but are thinking of joining, our membership application form is now posted on our “About Us” link.   All you have to do is to print a copy of the membership form, complete the form and send it to us in the mail along with your membership fee.

If you bought into Department 56 village items as a means to boost your retirement fund or increase your current net worth, I would suggest you avoid reading this article.   The author of the article panned numerous “collectibles” available to consumers/collectors as being worthless.   Unfortunately for us Department 56 collectors, “Department 56 holiday homes” is mentioned along with other well known brands, such as Franklin Mint, Beanie Babies and Norman Rockwell.

In case you have not noticed, I have added a page for Department 56 collector events. Just click on the link under the Department 56 Collector Gathering on the left hand side panel to see what events are happening on a particular year. The first Department 56 event that made it into our gathering page is the “Happy Trails to Arizona” event hosted by these collector clubs: Arizona Village Collectors, Desert Villagers and Southwest Villagers. If you are thinking about visiting the Grand Canyon State, look like you have found yourself a very good reason now!

This is my first blog of the year.   Hope everyone is doing well in 2011.  At the beginning of the year, Department 56 announced new introductions to its family of products.   Click “village” for the list of new items added to the village collection, click “snowbaby” to see the list of new Snowbaby introductions and click “others” for all other new products announced by the company.  Note that there are a number of new clock towers introduced to various village series to commemorate the 35th Anniversary of Department 56.   Each of these clock towers is limited to year of production and is priced at $35 each. 

Our club’s January meeting started off late but finished strong with fun activities.  Please visit our “Past meeting highlights” link to see all the details of that meeting.

By the way, did you notice that we have a new link on the left hand side panel?   Yes, we have started providing links to our club newsletters.   Just click on “2011” under Newsletters to see all of 2011’s newsletters.

For a change, I am telling everyone what I have planned to do for this blog in the near future.  I was inspired after watching the movie “Julie & Julia” a couple of weeks ago.   The movie gave me the idea that writing a good blog can be both fun and interesting for myself and my readers.  The “Julie” in the movie (Julie Powell) decided that not only she wanted to try out all the recipes in Julia Child’s famous cookbook “Mastering the Art of French Cooking”, she would also write a blog to describe her progress along the way.  It was a delightful movie that certainly kept me interested for a couple of hours.

But I digress.  My plan for this blog is to (a) re-introduce the articles we used to showcase in our previous edition of the TVCC web site, (b) include event information for upcoming gatherings hosted by Department 56 or Department 56 collector clubs and (c) add links to our wonderful bi-monthly newsletters produced by our newsletter team (led by Cheryl T.).  The last point could be a bit tricky as I need to locate free web space for storing our newsletters.   I have some ideas but I need to investigate a bit more to see how that can be done.  So stay tuned and hopefully, you will see these changes soon.  After all, I have committed myself here!

Made some changes to the blog site tonight.  Moved all information regarding club executives and club house location to the "About Us" page.  This main page, from now on, will contain club news or Department 56 news or whatever latest updates there may be.  I think by switching the information around, visitors to this site will have better ideas what have been changed/updated.  Hope you agree! :)

In the past couple of weeks, I have also added photographs and meeting highlights for club events in the past 5 years.  Go to “Club Events”  if you want to re-visit some of the fun things we have done in the past.