2018

 

I wanted to challenge myself with this year’s train car and what a challenge it was! I wanted to have a moving and musical train car, as all the rest of the years have been stationary. I bought a chime movement with the Christmas song “We wish you a merry Christmas” and engineered the entire carousel myself complete with not only revolving carousel but with the four main posts going up and down as it turned. It was a lot of accurate measuring but I made it work and met my own personal expectations.

As far as the features…

On the very top of the carousel is our newest family member Maisie! Maisie was a 1-year-old stray from the USA that was brought into a San Jose kill shelter. We adopted her through PetSmart in Langley and she was a little jittery but has gotten used to the cozy lifestyle we’ve been happy to give her.

The Carousel itself represents the fun of Disneyland where we visited in December. That is also why there is also a Mickey Mouse, Goofy and Jack Skellington, all Disney Characters.

Mickey is playing baseball, as it was Oliver’s first year playing baseball. His team was called the Astros.

Goofy is playing guitar as this was the year that Charlie started his road to Rock Stardom and started taking guitar lessons.

There are also Mario and Luigi riding bikes and that is because after 4 long years of trying Charlie and Oliver finally learned how to ride their bikes. They took part in a 4-day bike camp in the summer called PedalHeads and they haven’t looked back. Mom and Dad can’t stop smiling because of their accomplishments.

The Mario and Luigi also represent that was the year our boys were introduced to the world of video games which the Mario Brothers (Luigi=Oliver, Mario=Charlie) have been a constant source of conversation, bickering, fighting, competition, and severe obsession.

You can’t see it in any of the pictures but Jack Skellington is singing from a piece of sheet music. That sheet music reads “Smoke On The Water”, the first song Charlie learned on guitar.

That year was busy with me carving quite a bit more than normal and that transferred through to the amount of hours that went into this train car. Probably 200+ hours!