With our thanks to Roy Ramm and Richard Freeman for leading a tremendous effort yesterday and for the following report from Roy:

Yesterday we held our long-planned Decorations Day for the Parish Christmas tree at the Memorial Hall between 1pm and 5pm, though it took us from 5pm on Friday to decorate the hall and until 6:30pm on Saturday to clear up afterwards!

After so much planning we were naturally a bit apprehensive about what attendance might be like.  We shouldn’t have worried!  As we opened the doors at 1pm a steady flow of mums and dads and very excited children began and grew close to a flood.  Over the next few hours we had over 150 visitors. It was fantastic!

Every single one of about 80 slices of wood from a Felsted tree was decorated with snowmen, reindeer and Christmas trees.  Dozens of pine cones got glittered.  Children made dozens of lovely decorations to take home.  By the time the event closed we had pretty much run out of all materials.  Loads of children wrote letters to Santa and placed them in a superb Christmas post box made by Richard Freeman who is arranging for every one of them to receive a reply from the North Pole (which is surprisingly close to Cobblers Green).  Mums, dads and grandparents were treated to free teas, coffees and biscuits.

We received fantastically positive comments from the parents, a number of whom said it was the best ever thing Felsted PC had done.  In any event, as we also advertised the tree lighting on the 11th, we should now expect a really decent crowd .  All the children who came yesterday will be keen to see their painted tree slices, cones and stars around the Xmas tree.

The clear up was a huge effort.  Thousands of lights and four Christmas trees had to be taken down.  Every splash of paint, fragment of glitter and glob of glue had to be cleaned off the tables and chairs. (Special thanks to Hope’s mum!) Discarded coffee cup had to be clear and the newly painted Memorial Hall returned as we found it in time for today’s events.

A lot of people put in a great deal of effort before, during and after the event, so I would just like to acknowledge on behalf of the PC that Richard and I were ably supported by:

Janice Ratcliffe on Paper Skandi stars

Alice the crafter from Flitch Green on Christmas cards

Janet Johnston, Crafting Superwoman and so much more

Sarah Gale, Ensuring reindeer got fed

Hope Alexander, Elf, snow glober extraordinaire, and so so much more

Janet Ramm, painting pine cones and adding glitter to herself

Carol Freeman, stencilling tree slices and also adding glitter to herself

Anne Alexander, (Hope’s mum) for life saving teas coffees and biscuits

Dave Hardy, stars and stuff.

Roy Ramm

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