Christmas Stories Throughout the Years | The Little White Dollhouse Grandpa Built (1970s)

Some of my favorite Christmas memories from the 1970s didn’t come from a store. They came from my grandpa Bill’s hands. Grandpa Bill loved his “workshop.” That’s what he called it, anyway.

It was really a small gardening-style shed tucked into the postage-stamp-sized backyard behind my grandparents’ mobile home. But to him, it was a place where love turned into something you could touch.

He made things in that shed. Handmade gifts for my cousins and me. Carefully measured. Thoughtfully built.

When I was five years old, he made a dollhouse. Not a plastic one. Not something from the Sears catalog I circled my wishes in with a sharpie every year.

A real one. Wood. Solid. White. With red trim.

That dollhouse stayed at my grandparents’ house so all the cousins could play with it. I remember playing with it for hours, completely lost in my imagination. Sometimes alone. Sometimes with my cousins. Moving tiny furniture, creating little stories, feeling very grown up in my very small world.

It wasn’t flashy. It didn’t light up. It didn’t make noise. But it held something much bigger.

Time.

Care.

And the quiet kind of love that lasts.

A few years later, my grandpa passed away. We grew up. Life changed. The dollhouse wasn’t being played with anymore.

My grandmother donated the dollhouse to their church Sunday school so other children could enjoy it. At the time, that felt right.

Years passed. I became a mom. And more times than I can count, I found myself wishing I still had that little white dollhouse with the red trim.

I wished my daughter Kimberley could have played with it. I wish even more now with my granddaughter.

But life had one more chapter to add. In 2000, when my daughter was four years old, the church where the dollhouse had been donated burned down in a ten-engine fire. The dollhouse was lost. This was also the church my mom and grandmother were church organist for decades.

And yet… I’m not sharing story about loss. It’s a story about gratitude. Because I had the time. I had the memories. I had the gift of playing with something my grandpa poured so much love into.

Some Christmas gifts don’t survive the years. But the love behind them does.

And every time I think about that little white dollhouse, I remember this: The best traditions aren’t the ones we buy. They’re the ones we’re given by people who loved us deeply, quietly, and well.

This is one of many stories I shared in Christmas Stories from my childhood in the 1970s. Stories about handmade traditions, family, and the love that continues long after the decorations are put away.