Musée du Jouet

About this audio guide

This guide to the Musee du Jouet in Colmar opens on the Alsatian ritual of leaving a carrot and straw by the door for Saint Nicolas and his fearsome companion Hans Trapp each December the fifth. It follows that fourth-century bishop and his straw-stuffed bogeyman on their rounds through Alsace, and traces how one Colmar painter's private hoard of dolls and automata became a public collection inside an old neighborhood cinema. Along the way it lingers on the glass-eyed dolls and a frozen wind-up automaton from the nineteen sixties.