Restored Fairytale Vignettes at Children's Museum harken visitors back to Eaton’s glory days

Winnipeggers are invited to step back in time to experience a beloved, decades-old Christmas tradition.

Manitoba Children’s Museum has brought back the Eaton’s Fairytale Vignettes, a display that is fully restored and open to the public until mid-January.

Starting in the ‘60s, the vignettes were displayed at the iconic downtown Eaton’s store during the holidays.

“Eaton’s sort of coined themselves as a Christmas store. They were known for these ornate window displays, the Santa Claus parade – all those wonderful holiday things,” explained Andrea Brickwood, director of education and exhibits for the Manitoba Children’s Museum.

“The vignettes were created as sort of a passageway through Santa’s Village, all the way to see Santa.”

Each animatronic vignette depicts a scene from a classic story, like Cinderella dancing at the ball with Prince Charming or Rumpelstiltskin and his spinning wheel, said to turn straw into gold.

The museum inherited the vignettes from Eaton’s in 1999, when the department store chain declared bankruptcy and its downtown Winnipeg store closed.

Over the years, the museum has done some restoration work on the decades-old animatronics, most notably moving them out of their frames that were reminiscent of a Bavarian cityscape and into individual cases.

Brickwood said the annual exhibit draws visitors of many generations, including those who saw the vignettes in their original glory on Portage Avenue.

“We have lots of visitors coming in – grandparents, parents, bringing their children to see these vignettes because they remember them from when they were children,” Brickwood said.

“They are brought back to those times. It's really wonderful.”