I knew I had been warped by covering local communities for too many years when I instituted zoning in the Christmas village on my mantel.

I grew up in a planning family. My mother was a longtime member of the planning and zoning board of my hometown. I remember sitting through meetings in Town Hall when I needed a ride home from downtown.

I have spent a good part of my adulthood sitting in similar meetings in Pittsburgh, Wilkens, Braddock, McKeesport, Monroeville and Ross watching developers present their site plans, detailing the landscaping, the set backs, the materials they would use for the facades.

This year, when I briefly considered having my children (who are in kindergarten and second grade) present site plans to the East Wall/mantel Regional Planning Commission for any proposed revisions to our Christmas Village, I knew I was going too far.

The village started innocently enough. The first piece had sat for ages, dusty, in the Post-Gazette editorial department. It was a grocery store, sent by Heinz. No one wanted to take it, but I was covering Braddock -- no conflict of interest there. I also got the Heinz clock that arrived in the department the next year.

I set the pieces of the village on the mantel. The grocery store needed customers. I found a tavern/flop house.

Now that I had a place to stay, a place to eat and a place to shop, I realized these folks needed good union jobs in manufacturing. I bought the candle factory.

By this time the display took up the top of one bookshelf on one side of the mantel. I had fake snow, trees, a park bench.

The next summer I bought a house. Zoning started to take hold, as the house was on one side of the shelf, next to the tavern, which was next to the grocery store, which was next to the candle factory, gradually moving from single-family residential, "R-1" in planners parlance, to "I" for industrial.

The next summer I bought two more houses and more fake snow. It meant I had to clear the top of the bookcase on the other side of the mantel.

Now, the north bookcase is the commercial, industrial section of town. I still operate a television with rabbit ears, and the antenna (which sits on a paint can to get good reception through the window) is next to the candle factory, which shares the mantel with the store and the tavern. The single family residential housing is across the mantel on the southern bookshelf, with a bronze statue my father gave me, which is now the village's public art.

There are street lights and a delivery truck. A tiny brass mortar and pestle sit on top of the grocery store, indicating it is also a pharmacy.

I have borrowed my son's Brio train, which circles the top of each bookshelf and travels across the mantel, to provide mass transit. Along the mantel it passes the menorah and the model Christmas tree. We live in a non-religious house but we celebrate all of the holidays of our ancestors -- particularly if they are associated with food or presents.

My children and I like to sit and look at the lights of the village at night. Sometimes we tell stories about the people who live there. Sometimes we just watch the train go back and forth as it climbs the hills up to the bridges that carry the train over the electrical wires that serve the homes and businesses.

We imagine the people going back and forth. If we had more room maybe we would add a school, or a town hall, or a sewage-treatment plant.

It's sort of nice that we are limited by space, which means we have to imagine the rest, as I think of the endless planning board meetings it took to get the place built. Those meetings with the little reporter, sitting in one of the rows of little metal folding chairs, struggling to stay awake.