Kelowna resident Kathy Bernard's miniature Christmas town now takes up an entire room in her basement.
(ADAM PROSKIW / iNFOnews.ca)
December 25, 2015 - 8:00 PM
KELOWNA - In a quiet neighbourhood on the outskirts of Glenmore is a Christmas town so perfect it looks like it sprang from the brush of Norman Rockwell.
K-Town, or Kathy's Town, is a sprawling, snowy little village replete with a Town Hall, a theatre, outdoor skating rink, veterinary hospital and everything else you’d expect to find in a country town. Except this one is in Kathy Bernard’s basement.
“I tell people it’s crazy when they ask but I don’t tell very many people about it,” she says. “It’s just something I do for my grandkids.”
The buildings are part of a collection she buys from craft stores, but setup of a town like hers involves much more than just opening a box and choosing where to put the building. Each one requires power for the lights and she has invested hundreds in trees, street lights, furniture and other details that make K-Town so realistic.
"I buy a little more each year," she says. "When I put it up last year I didn't even end up using all of them. There wasn't any room."
(ADAM PROSKIW / iNFOnews.ca)
K-Town takes up an entire room in her basement and almost every year she has to buy at least one more table to accommodate her growing collection. It started with only about a dozen buildings but has since grown to more than 75.
“I started with 99 people but there are too many to count now,” she says. “I wasn’t going to buy any more this year but I ended up going to Rona the other day and now there’s an outdoor barbecue that I’d really like to buy.”
Residents of K-Town live interesting lives. They do everything from chop trees, visit with Santa, fish on a frozen pond and ice skate. There is even a train.
Bernard says she’s never considered opening her town to the public, saying it’s just for friends and family.
“I’d be scared to let people in here, who knows what they’d think,” she says with a laugh. “It’s a little out of control.”
(ADAM PROSKIW / iNFOnews.ca)
The set up only takes a few days, but takedown, she says, is much more involved. There are individual boxes for each building and residents of K-Town also have their own place in her crowded storage room.
“Last year I put it up reluctantly but I did it. There are neighbours on both sides that have little girls and once they saw all my boxes in my storage room she said I had to put it up. And all my kids say I have to do it again so I will. Once I get started it’s fun.”
To contact a reporter for this story, email Adam Proskiw at aproskiw@infonews.ca or call 250-718-0428. To contact the editor, email mjones@infonews.ca or call 250-718-2724.
News from © iNFOnews, 2015