Since this is our last Friday blog before Christmas, we want to wish you a happy holiday. It has been a year of ups and downs, but we are happy to report we ended the year on a positive note with the early feedback from the Holiday House Tour and Bough and Dough Shop. If you are looking for a last minute gift or two from our 2018 lineup of Bough and Dough Shop artists, we still have those with a website or Etsy store listed on our Featured Artisans page. The artists would be delighted to hear from you – let them know you found them through the Bough and Dough Shop, too! The page will likely stay up as-is until the summer or fall of 2019 as we begin to nail down the next artist lineup.
We also still have the two feedback surveys open, the Shop and Artisan specific survey and the Holiday House Tour and Shop survey. Remember to be specific in your written comments, particularly in asking for types of items you would like to see at the Shop in 2019 (i.e., instead of saying “jewelry,” let us know what type of jewelry – metalworking, polymer clay, beaded, etc.). We will be reviewing the feedback in January of 2019.
As always, the invitation for you to join the Holiday House Tour 2019 team stands so you can make the event more of what you want to see. The drastic improvement to the Shop in 2018 was due entirely to rethinking event from the ground up by one person from January to August after watching the process for two to three years. The same can absolutely be done for the Tour itself from anyone familiar with its goals and ambitions. We strongly encourage anyone who feels that the House Tour is not meeting their expectations to take your written feedback a step further and give back to this community tradition through action. Make this your New Year’s Resolution, become involved as one of the volunteer leaders, and make the Holiday House Tour your dream event. Doing so will probably even give you more personal benefits than just producing a better event.
You may leave your information as a volunteer by stating specifically you want to take on improving some specific part (some feedback included allusions to writing and submitting press releases, running an Instagram, being a house decorator to make sure it meets your level of “festive,” etc. – all are very welcome tasks for volunteer leaders) for the Holiday House Tour at phwinc.org@gmail.com, by phone at 540-667-3577, or by snail mail addressed to PHW, 530 Amherst St., Winchester, VA 22601. You do not need to be a member of PHW or join the board of directors to be a volunteer leader, but attending meetings to make reports, take suggestions, and give directions to PHW staff is critical, particularly in the final preparation stages of September-November.
And just for fun, you might relive your childhood a bit with a short YouTube video of Andy Davis at the Johnson County Museum exploring aluminum Christmas trees in the era of America’s space race and futuristic fascination. We hope you were able to experience one in person if you went to the Patsy Cline Historic House during the Holiday House Tour weekend. While they may be a kitschy throwback, they remain highly evocative of the late 1950s to 1960s holidays. While they don’t work for all homes, if you have a “newly historic” home from the 1960s, you might want to think about trying an aluminum tree for some properly retro vibes!