Christmas countdown 7 — school winter faire!

Well first, I just realize that if this is a "countdown," we probably should be counting from 24 to one, not going up from one to 24. Ah, well.

Anyway, for two months, our school community has been feverishly crafting and plotting creative adventures for our first fundraising faire. In spite of the fairly overwhelming process—I recommend longer than two months to dream up and execute something like this, if at all possible—no blood was shed (although there were a few tears: Rain! RAIN!) and the day was simply wonderful.

I chose the bake sale, out of fear of becoming fully immersed if I worked on the "store" crew, which is what I really wanted to do. At first volunteerism was low for the bake sale, but in the end a lot of families rallied, and probably a third of them participated. Faire-goers bought all day, and we didn't have much left at the end.

The kids helped make pipe cleaner chains for our winter wonderland.

Our decorations chairperson was AMAZING — so many lovely, simple, gorgeous ideas, like these snow scenes.

The shop had lovely, lovely handmade items. I adore these stockings, but can't bear to hang stockings that I haven't made, so I'm hoping the knitter will share the pattern!

 Another family's dad (Grandpa) made these beautiful flapping seagulls. Wonderful!

I didn't get any photos of Starboy enjoying himself, since I was at the bakesale table. Mommy fail: I should have taken a break. He crafted two snow globes and spent many tickets vying for trinkets at the Stocking Surprise booth (feel for what's in the stocking and see what prize you get).

It was a great, but exhausting day. I spent 11 hours at the school, and I was there until 10pm the night before. But we raised a lot of funds and it was worth it!

Today's book was "Christmas Tree Farm," by David Budbill. It would have been more appropriate to read on the day we get our tree, but, I don't have this all planned out and anyway it's a short term loan from the library and we only could keep it for a week.

It's a nice, straightforward story of how Christmas trees are grown for sale, with really great illustrations.