The putz is a miniature landscape of various buildings, fences, trees, shrubs, grass, waterways, humans, animals, wagons and much more around the base of the Christmas tree.
While not the Nativity scene in a replica manger, the putz is often arranged around the Nativity scene in a village-like arrangement.
The putz originated in Germany and was brought to America by the Pennsylvania Dutch, who settled southeastern Pennsylvania. The word “putz” is from the German “putzen,” which means “to put.”
One of the largest modern-day putz displays has been erected annually at the Schwenkfelder Library and Heritage Center http://schwenkfelder.com/index.html
in Pennsburg, Pennsylvania. However, the library/heritage center opted for a different approach for Christmas 2016. Instead of the gigantic, room-filling putz, the center featured several smaller putz displays created by invited local artists to depict different time periods.
Here’s a video slideshow of the Schwenkfelder putz from 2015.
In simpler times, children would forage the countryside in the weeks before Christmas to gather natural materials to build the putz landscapes in their homes, materials like crow’s foot, evergreen twigs, ferns, gravel, moss, partridgeberry plants, small stones, sticks and more.
The Christmas tree was placed on a table or into a large wooden crate with boards across the top to form the foundation for the putz around the tree.
Cardboard houses and toy-like, wooden and later plastic, animals, humans, wagons and more were arranged amid the natural materials to create the scene, which often was unveiled with grand ceremony. Lighting effects were another component of many putz displays.
Neighbors visited one another’s homes to view the scenes, spread holiday cheer and partake of the treats of the season.
The cardboard houses, which once were house-shaped cardboard candy boxes from Germany, eventually morphed into pasteboard houses manufactured in Japan especially for Christmastime scenes. The Japan-made houses were decorated with fake snow and, eventually, glitter. (Collectors refer to them as glitterhouses.) They had holes in their back walls to allow the insertion of one of the bulbs in a Christmas light set that shone through the cellophane windows of the house.