Another Christmas season in qathet has come and gone. The biggest change from last year is that we are actually living on the Bluff. This has made setup and break-down a lot easier and on evenings when the Enchanted Christmas Forest is open to the neighbours, its a short walk to the house once we’ve shut down the lights and closed up the forest for the evening.
The Forest walk continues to grow each year. Earlier in the Fall, we built a covered pergola, just steps from Santa’s Summer Cottage. In the summer it will be a dining area for rainy days, but during the Christmas holidays it serves as a place where you can take a group picture with Frosty. Since Frosty is the heart of the Enchanted Forest walk we make sure he has plenty of Christmas music to keep him happy and dancing. Frosty is also made of the softest fuzzy cover, so rubbing Frosty’s belly was a popular past-time.
The Enchanted Forest was well advertised this year, it was mentioned in the qathet Living lifestyle magazine in an article on “Christmas displays to see on the peninsula”. I made sure that the different Facebook groups were advised of the days and hours and of course word of mouth and lots of chatter on Facebook resulted in more than twice as many visitors as last year.
Our best guess is that we had about 1000 visitors to the Enchanted Christmas Forest over the six nights we had it opened. Many gallons of hot chocolate were served and even during the rainiest nights, there was a steady flow of families, dogs and the occasional Christmas elf coming in off of Twin Eagles Road.
Our most trusted ambassador, Sparkles the reindeer, stands high on a platform and is easily seen from both directions on highway 101. Sparkles goes up near the end of November and has become a beloved landmark to brighten the darkest days of winter. As a billboard, he also gets people talking about the Enchanted Christmas Forest. As a bonus, he’s also visible from special view points on the Forest walk.
I also spent most of November and December building a rather intricate elf house that also served as a place to accept donations. It was a lot more detailed work than I originally anticipated, but I enjoyed the process and have plans to enlarge this into an Elf Village over time. Kids loved the concept and were drawn to this little scene. What I loved was how they started imagining little stories and creating characters for each of the elves. Next year I will start introducing more interactive components so that they can play, spin and move items around. All-in-all a good start to something that will continue to grow with time.