Harvest Craft Show returns to Buckhorn
Annual event helps support community centre and Yellow Ribbon Campaign
This year’s Harvest Craft Show takes place at the Buckhorn Community Centre Thanksgiving weekend, Saturday, Sunday and Monday.
What started as a small show 40 years ago with about 22 vendors has grown to gill two large rooms and 11 buildings with over 100 vendors.
The show focuses on items of outstanding quality and variety.
With only 10 weeks left until Christmas, the Harvest Craft Show is the place to start Christmas shopping.
There will be many one of kind gifts for those people on your list, or maybe, a treat for yourself or home. In these days of massproduced items, it is a pleasure to be able to find something unique and handmade with love.
The Craft Show is pleased to welcome approximately 100 artisans from all areas of Ontario featuring the very best selection of Canadian handcrafted seasonal, country, traditional and contemporary crafts.
Among the many items that will be on display are candles, pottery, leather goods, gourmet foods, furniture, Florals, wooden toys, children’s clothing, jewellery, designer clothing for the entire family, handmade soaps, hand painted glass and a wide variety of home décor items. Also featured will be items for seasonal decorating at Halloween or Christmas.
This year will see the involvement of the Yellow Ribbon Campaign, started in 2009 as a memorial to our Cpl. Nick Bulger, who was killed in Afghanistan.
At that time, craft organizers put out little cans with red sweaters asking for contributions to purchases items from home to send to troops overseas.
To date, 1,389 boxes have been sent to Canadian Troops in Bosnia, Afghanistan, Kuwait, Latvia, Poland, Ukraine, Egypt and now Mali. This includes 97 boxes sent before 2009.
The most recent of these has been approximately 50 boxes of large Freezies to Mali where the temperatures range in the 40s. These boxes contain jam, hot
sauce, cookies, energy bars, trail mix, nuts, cereal bars, instant coffee, coffee whitener, tea, Cheese Whix, peanut bitter, vienna sausages, sardines, oysters, pepperoni sticks, drink flavour crystals, gum, licorice, candy, lip balm, moisturizer, puzzle books, calendars and more. Items with Canadian markings are always popular, as soldiers trade them with other UN troops.
Donations for the program will be accepted at the craft show as volunteers prepare Christmas boxes for the troops.
The Yellow Ribbon Campaign recently received an email from Mali: “The generosity and thoughtfulness is what makes Canadians stand apart from all other countries in the world! We were able to share some of the packages with our German counterparts and they were very surprised and grateful as they said nothing like that exists in Germany. As on any deployment, there are some folks here who have no family or their circumstances dictate that they do not receive mail so the packages you send
help to lift spirits!”
The troops also love to receive letters and drawing from local kids.
There’s free postal service to soldiers in November and December.
Anyone wanting to provide their own gift box can contact Darlene Loucks at rdloucks@yahoo.ca and she will provide a name.