Do they not have many brick building where they are from / or Christmas lights etc

I lived in North America for a bit and outside of some of the oldest cities, you saw hardly any brick housing or certainly not in our style or scale. They didn't have wee towns like this - or i certainly didn't find many. It was all plasterboard housing and big wide roads with no pavements. Towns are made for cars and that is just how they do things there. An exception is parts of Montreal Old Town, which was the closest i saw to a European stone/brick architecture. It kind of looked a bit like Leith by the docks (i guess you would have to know that to compare lol).

Some of the places I did see lovely historic housing, like parts of New York City, were so mega expensive that regular people could not live there anymore. And far more large in scale than a cutesy town. I genuinely missed going around like a market square and that kind of thing.