Holiday Handcraft Fair Tradition Continues December 7-12
Can you imagine what it would be like to live inside a gingerbread house?
For the last 47 years, Fall has been “Fair season” at BWS, when our whole school community worked together to transform the grade school building and grounds into the Holiday Handcraft Fair for one unforgettable day.
From Falling Leaves to Falling Snow
October set off a flurry of making, doing, and getting ready. BWS parents held crafting circles in the mornings after drop off, learned to sew “heavy babies” with Mrs. Palmer, and built wooden toys together in the woodshop after bedtime.
Each class worked together to create a theme and decorations to transform rooms throughout the school, including first grade’s Little People’s Shop, where children choose gifts for family and friends, seventh grade’s Country Store, and eighth grade’s Handcraft Room, with warm handmade items including winter accessories and soft toys.
A Winter Wonderland of Family Fun
Together, we transformed the school into memory-making puppet shows, horse-drawn hayrides, face painting, jump rope making, and candle dipping. Other highlights included the children’s craft room, our favorite “lemon sippers,” a very special cakewalk with live musicians, maple sugar cotton candy, and the Pocket Wizard, whose many pockets are filled with small gifts—all traditions handed down from parent to parent for almost 50 years. The centerpiece, in the school library, was the silent auction, full of wondrous goods and services from local makers, as well as art, gifts including food and wine, and a chance to win a fabulous get-away.
A Fair for Our Times
This year, the 48th Holiday Handcraft Fair is being reinvented as an online auction, with the same fantastic goods, services, and handmade items—a real slice of the Berkshires you can share with family and friends all over the world. We’ll recreate many of our beloved traditions, for example, a “lemon sipper family kit,” a chance to win a cakewalk cake, or a CSA from our Pumpkin Hollow school garden. In prior years, BWS children and adults alike would be knitting in every spare moment to finish unique squares that come together to form the Community Afghan—and that won’t change!
Warm Hands, Warm Hearts
We think of community as “building something together,” and that tradition is strong in the Berkshires, family to family. This year, many of the treats and fun we enjoyed together in years past, now you can share at home. Please join us December 7-12 for the 48th Annual Berkshire Waldorf School Holiday Handcraft Auction on www.charityauctionstoday.com. You can register in advance beginning November 23rd.
And to donate, please contact fair@berkshirewaldorfschool.org no later than Wednesday, December 2 to include your gift or service in the online auction.
Spreading the joys of a handmade holiday in the Berkshires!
