Busy Festival time

Signature seasonal events pivot to online

The Festival of Trees and Busy Hands craft show have been welcome fixtures in the lead-up to the holiday season. The first of these is an important fundraiser for the Hospital Auxiliary and a very popular place to purchase home-made baked goods and preserves. The craft show provided a great opportunity for County makers to sell their wares, and thousands of people flocked to both these events, year after year. The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has meant that a more creative approach was needed to keep these events alive.

(L-R): Bay Woodyard and Vicki Emlaw, seen here in a photo from 2017, are the organizers of the Busy Hands Craft Show, which has now moved online.

This is the thirteenth year the Hospital Auxiliary has managed the Festival of Trees, and they have moved to an online version that can be accessed at pecfestivaloftrees.ca. Photographs of the decorated Christmas trees up for auction can be viewed starting November 12, and the auction ends on November 27. Members of the Festival Committee decided to continue with the festive food sale, but in a COVID-safe way. For months, they have been making preserves and baking things such as shortbread, pies Christmas cakes and butter tarts, and they sold them at several different farmers’ markets over the past few weeks, as well as taking online orders until November 7. The very popular Shopping Boutique will now be held at the Second Time Around shop in Picton on November 28 and 29. A selection of new and nearly new items have been set aside for this sale, and there are always great bargains to be had. The focus of this year’s fundraising is the purchase of a crash cart defibrillator. The one currently in service is end-of-life in 2021, so a replacement is absolutely necessary. The Auxiliary has set a fundraising goal of $35,000, which may be ambitious given that they have had to close the hospital coffee shop, in addition to having the thrift store closed for a number of weeks. “The Auxiliary fundraising was dramatically affected by COVID, so we were really happy to find a mechanism to still have the Festival of Trees, though in a different format,” says Festival chairperson Liz Jones. “It’s the beginning of the holiday season, and I hope we will do this Festival again. In the meantime, until we can meet, this was an important opportunity to fundraise for the hospital and give the community an opportunity to participate too.”

The Busy Hands Craft Show is also moving online. Organizers Vicki Emlaw and Bay Woodyard have gathered together 37 vendors who have provided a list of items they have for sale. The list is available at busyhandspec.ca, and buyers can order the items for pick-up at the Crystal Palace on November 28. Orders will close on November 21 so that the items can be packaged and delivered by the vendors to the Crystal Palace in time. Of necessity, the number of vendors is considerably reduced from previous years. In part this is due to some regular vendors not actually making any (or making substantially fewer) items this year because they had no venues for sales. Other vendors had one-ofa- kind offerings that were not really compatible with being on a general list. Still, there are a few new vendors. And to prove that the entrepreneurial spirit is alive and well, one of the vendors is a 12-year-old 4-H member who is offering a line of non-medical face masks. It will be a drive-through pick-up for buyers on November 28, and Emlaw says there will a full complement of people to keep the flow going through. “A lot of vendors have volunteered to help because they’re so excited to be able to sell their stuff somewhere, since so many things have been cancelled. The sellers are grateful we are doing this.”