"A Holiday Visit" is one of my all-time fav shows and in fact the only one I still have on audio tape from when I was a kid. I finally located it on-line and now have a cd copy that I listen to repeatedly at Xmas every year. The more I listen to it, the more I figure out about the mystery. At one point the wife remarks about how clearly she can see the stars, and then the lights in the town, including the stars all go out at once. Obviously, the stars were the lights on the xmas tree and someone had unplugged them. As for Mrs. McGinnis, she is obviously supposed to be a figurine in the diorama. The reason that she meets them more than once and doesn't recognize them is that the diorama has more than one copy of the Mrs. Mcginnis figurine. At one point, Mrs. McGinnis comments that there used to be more people in the town but every year a few more "go away." Apparently, this was the script writer's clever way of using the fact that every year we drop and break or lose parts of our Christmas sets (the dog chews them up or the kids take them to play with and they end up in the toy box--reminds me of how my own family eventually lost the original baby Jesus from our under-the-tree nativity scene.) I have to admit the one thing that still makes no sense to me is the phone call between the wife and her father. That said, it's still a totally cool episode.