Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: sometimes we leave the house for Christmas activities here in Indianapolis! Last year my wife and I attended the Indiana Repertory Theatre’s annual take on A Christmas Carol and had primo seats in the front-row fake-snow splash zone. My coworkers and I have made the Indiana Historical Society’s Festival of Trees a team-building tradition. Anne and I also used to escort her Mamaw to the Christmas Gift and Hobby Show at the Indiana State Fairgrounds until her passing in 2018. We’re Christmas fans in search of more Christmas ’round town, even though our place is loaded with enough Christmas decor for three households. (I’m not complaining.)

Once again we were blessed with an opportunity for another local cultural experience whose advertising we’ve noted and dismissed till now — free tickets courtesy of my employer (one of their organization’s corporate partners) to the Eiteljorg Museum of American Indians and Western Art on the occasion of their annual Jingle Rails exhibit. Whatever’s normally in their Allen Whitehill Clowes Sculpture Court is carted off elsewhere and replaced with enormous dioramas that are festooned with Christmas decorations and toy train tracks. Li’l locomotives run laps nonstop around the hall while visitors gape in childlike wonder. I guess that’s the ritual? As I said, this was our first time.

I’ve no idea how much they change it up every year, but for the 2024 edition we beheld recreations of various Indianapolis landmarks and institutions, as well as a featured focus on national parks and other American tourist attractions west of the Mississippi, all constructed with exacting precision from assorted woods, nuts, seeds, fungi, crops, and other tree parts all extensively annotated on signs for each section. Nine G-scale trains followed their assigned routes through and around these microcosms at varying speeds, which posed a bit of a challenge for us amateur hobbyists with cameras. Please enjoy this gallery of our experience and the few electric trains we caught that didn’t look like Barry Allen jogging at Mach 3. The choo-choo-peeping part was more fun in person.

…and we have more pics, but this’ll do for now. We also explored the Eiteljorg’s galleries, but we’ll do a separate entry for those. Merry Christmas in the meantime!