Skyscrapers finds space in miniature Christmas village

BACOLOD CITY — Skyscrapers have risen in this city’s iconic miniature Christmas village.

The village that featured quaint Victorian scenes 21 years ago has evolved and gone global through the years, but with proper zoning.

Artist-designer Bamboo Tonogbanua managed to tastefully blend the old and the new.

The Christmas village, on the second floor of Tonogbanua’s ancestral home on San Juan Street here, has opened once again to bring holiday cheers to visitors until the first week of January.

Visitors are welcome from 6 a.m. to 9 p.m. daily.

The village, which started in 1996 as a hobby on a single table, now fills an entire 36-square-meter air conditioned room with thousands of miniature objects that included buildings, people, vehicles, carnival rides, castles, trains, Christmas trees and manger scenes collected by Tonogbanua from his travels to various parts of the world and from friends.

Every section of the room is filled with different sounds of Christmas and delightful moving objects.

Among the newest attractions in the village were models of famous architectural icons — Sagrada Familia in Barcelona, Burj Khalifa in Dubai and Church of the Savior on Spilled Blood in St. Petersburg.

Among the miniature versions of skyscrapers at the village were Chrysler Building and Empire State Building in New York City and Petronas Twin Towers in Kuala Lumpur.

But the latest additions were not all modern.

At the original section of the village was a new countryside village with a fountain in the courtyard and new houses border the village above the entrance door.

As one enters the village from the first floor, a 32-inch Barbie Angel Doll greets guests who get to the village through a stairway bedecked with roses.