Villages of cardboard houses have been decorating homes for the Christmas season since the late 19th century.
The tradition began as a marketing ploy by Germany candymakers. Boxes of their chocolates and other sweets were designed and printed to resemble houses in winter. Buy the box, eat the contents and keep the box as Christmas decoration.
That lasted until the late 1920s, when Japanese manufacturers began poking holes in the backs of pasteboard houses they manufactured purely as holiday décor. They also equipped the houses with tiny, colored cellophane windows. The houses did not carry candy, but the new c-6 light set bulbs could be pushed through those holes to shine light through the little houses.
(Here’s a gallery of pasteboard houses and glitterhouses.)
Although the houses sold for just 5 or 10 cents each in American department stores, the Japanese crafters came up with an amazing variety.
They lost their hold on the market with the advent of World War II, which presented opportunities for American manufacturers to serve the homefront market, but not before adding glitter to the “snow” they painted onto the houses. That last innovation gave rise to a specialized segment of the market known as glitterhouses.
The popularity of cardboard houses, outside the collector community, waned through the second half of the 20th century as new activities and technologies drew interest away from family-centered activities like setting up the Christmas village around the base of the Christmas tree.