Vintage Precious Moments Sugar Town Boy with Snowball Sign – Christmas Pageant Marquee, Elementary School, Enesco Bisque Porcelain, 1997

A little noticeboard on two carved posts, a garland of green leaves and a pale lilac bow along the top, a sprig of holly in the snow at its foot. The lettering is hand-drawn in the Precious Moments way — round, slightly wobbly, as though a child had chalked it:

Sugar Town® Elementary School — Come to the Annual Christmas Pageant, Friday · Dec. 23 · 7:00 — All 27 Residents Welcome — Bake Sale to Follow.

Twenty-seven residents is the joke the whole village runs on. Beside the board stands a boy in a peaked cap with a satchel over his shoulder, a small round ball cupped in one mitten.

This belongs to Sugar Town, the corner of Precious Moments that builds a whole village rather than single figures — lighted houses, named townspeople, and small pieces of scenery like this one that make the scene hold together. The board names its set: the Elementary School, which came with the lighted schoolhouse, the merry-go-round, and the neighbours Aunt Cleo, Aunt Bulah, Uncle Sam and Heather.

The finish is bisque, fired and left unglazed, so the surface is chalk-soft and the colour sits in the porcelain rather than on it. The whole piece is painted in the palest wash — the green of the garland, the lilac bow, the boy's blue coat all barely there — with three tiny red dots for holly berries doing all the work of colour. The base is marked © 1997 Precious Moments, Inc. · Licensee Enesco Corporation · 272809.

For a collector building Sugar Town, a Precious Moments shelf, or a Christmas village that needs a schoolhouse.