Planning ahead
Christmas is coming.
Yes I realize that October just got here and that there is a whole spooky season thing going on, followed by the hunting and eating season thing before we even get around to the Christmas season, but it is never too early to start planning.
In the immortal words of Taylor Swift “Haters gonna hate, hate, hate, hate, hate.” I fully accept that many people out there will hate me talking about Christmas when the temperatures are in the 70s and I just picked up a bucket of fresh strawberries from my favorite local berry patch.
In full disclosure, I never really stop thinking about Christmas.
This is the point at which I could get all sappy and talk about sharing in the milk of human kindness and quote treacly, sentimental greeting cards about the need to keep the spirit of Christmas in our hearts. Heck, with a little prompting I am sure I could get my son Alex to recite most if not all of the Charles Dickens “Christmas Carol” radio play he was part of last winter. There are all kinds of mushy and squishy reasons to keep Christmas all year long.
However, my ongoing thoughts about Christmas tend to focus on things around taking down and putting up Christmas lights in the Medford City Park for the annual Holiday Magic Along the Medford Riverwalk. Each year we try to nudge the bar a little higher and keep things fresh. The challenge is doing this while maintaining what we have while dealing with shipping delays and COVID-related supply change screw ups.
It doesn’t help that I am by nature what I like to describe as being a “big thinker.” For my family and the friends who still answer my phone calls, the better description is “big pain in their rear end” for roping them into projects without having a clear exit plan of passing the torch onto someone else.
The long-term vision for Holiday Magic is to have lighted framework displays along the mile-long path between Hwy 64 and Allman St. serving as a beacon of good cheer that you can see from outer space. Meanwhile I keep on coming up with ideas that make the other members of the Medford Kiwanis Club cringe, although some will begrudgingly admit that the idea could be kinda neat provided I supply them with enough of my homemade beer.
With a backlog of metal sculptures waiting to be fabricated — the delay being that local metal shops are being kept pretty busy with farmers and other customers that have much tighter deadlines and whose livelihoods depend on getting back to work — I have turned my thoughts to other decorating ideas, particularly to gnomes.
Anyone with a Pinterest account has seen the shrub gnomes where a pointy hat and bulbous nose and maybe a beard are placed on a shrub giving it the appearance of being a gnome. You can even purchase kits to turn your shrubbery into a donsy of gnomes.
I got to thinking that the Kiwanis Club has traditionally decorated a rather large evergreen tree near our monument by the millpond dam and how awesome it would be to turn that into a giant tree gnome with an oversized hat made out of the material used for making boat covers. From there it would be a matter of lining up someone with access to a bucket truck to put the hat on the tree.
I personally think a 60 foot tall tree gnome would present an eye-catching attraction for downtown Medford.
Of course, dreaming up something like this is only the first step. Other steps are to find someone with equipment and skill to sew a 25 foot tall pointy gnome hat and then come up with the money needed to pay for the work to be done. With so many worthwhile causes in the community, I always find it a challenge to make an appeal for funds for something that would be just fun and hopefully make people smile on a gloomy winter day.
Perhaps some day I will win the lottery and be able to make all my big ideas happen, until then I will be dreaming and thinking while I sort through strings of lights to salvage working strands out of the ones damaged in last winter’s storms. Christmas is coming.
Brian Wilson is News Editor at The Star News.
