December 28, 2002 - Warm Beach 6a
Note on 4/6/03: I lost the pictures for this page because of a mistake I made. Sorry. The same is true for all the pages from 9/2/02 through 10/5/02, and again from 11/15/02 through all of 12/28/02. If I'm able to retrieve them, I'll replace them eventually. Again, I'm very sorry.
One of the more photographed places at the event. That's a waterfall in the background, and the timing on the white & blue lights makes it quite believable. And a couple of the many animated characters here.
The Talking Christmas Tree is Bruce the Spruce. There's even a book called "Bruce the Spruce and the Christmas Goose". There's a video camera in the tree with speakers and microphone, and the several fellows who man the tree are real good. They ask the kids questions like, "Do you know why Santa washes his clothes in Tide? Because it's too cold out-tide!" And it's really fun to watch the young (and not so young) people talking to a tree! He'll occasionally tell the kids to deliver a message to Santa, and of course there were times aplenty when Santa was telling the kids to ask Bruce things too. Like did he ever get too much spruce juice?
I cut out the miners, and Barb painted them with some others. Fun to see how what we did in November worked out for the event. And Trail's End (Barb paint the "'s end" on this sign) is a nice large lodge for big families or groups for the "bed & breakfast" plan. It was here that the 10 women went for their annual "wrapping party."
A couple of my favorite St. Nick's from the Victorian Inn. Beautiful expensive capes, and real fir on the guy on the right.
Some of the detail in the Victorian Inn, and some Tee-Pees from Tinhorn Town.
Inside Tinhorn Town Sally and Barb Miller are working as cashiers, and the bears are enjoying the scenery. Sally and Barb are a couple of the SOWER women, but there are about 90 other volunteers along with about the same number of paid staff every night, so the SOWERS only make up a small portion of the volunteers that make this event possible.
The painting even looks cold, doesn't it. About 90 percent of this building was built by SOWERs over a two-year period. Not bad for a bunch of retired people, eh? And there's animated "Nanna Bell's Sewing Corner." I had a group that decorated the outside of this building over the "working weekend" after Thanksgiving, but the inside crew did a great job, didn't they?
One of my favorite stories is about the person (no, I don't know if she was blonde or not) who thought it was a shame all these trees were cut so the trunks could be decorated; in fact, at night, it appears that only the trunks of the trees exist. Of course, all the trees are simply trimmed in lights to a certain height; she was asked to take a closer look and see that all the trees were still whole.
The pony rides for those under 4 feet in height, and a shot of the Cedar Lodge with some of the lights I helped put up.
A couple of shots of the big Nativity scene. We'll be showing more later. The main figures are about 9' tall. And the story about the birth of Jesus as told by Luke. It was nice that some people were reading the story for the first time. Also rather surprising to me.
More of the Nativity, and the fire ring near Joyland. Les Sargent was the official fire-bug among other things. We have five fire rings to keep burning, and they're popular places when it's as chilly as it's been. One night the artificial pond froze over completely it was so cold. But people came bundled up and we sold a lot of hot chocolate and hot cider.