the walk-through advent calendar...

the walk-through advent calendar that i mentioned in the last post seemed to go quite well.

i probably blogged about it last year, but basically the idea is quite simple - 25 little stations, each of which looks at one character or place or item from the christmas story (mary, joseph, the magi, bethlehem, the gifts, the star etc etc...) and a cafe serving festive foodstuffs. folk volunteer in advance to create the stations, and when it's all up and running, you go round and 'do' the stations like you'd open the doors on an advent calendar, exploring the advent/christmas story in the process.

for this year's event we used st margaret's, an old and disused church in burley which is about to be brought back to life as an arts and conference centre called 'leftbank leeds'... it's a brilliant space, and once it's resurrected it'll be a truly amazing venue, but at the mo there's no heating or lighting or power in there, and - we discovered - it leaks quite badly in places...!
so it was a mammoth effort to set up and run - me and G and lloydy must have each spent about 17 hours in there over the weekend - and we paid out an awful lot to (partially) heat the place and to hire the cardigan centre next door for the use of it's toilets...

as ever, people were really creative and inventive with their stations, and we had some very positive feedback from both contributors and visitors (including five coppers who popped in for a nosey). if i can get ahold of some images of the event i'll post them up here (i took our camera, but somewhat predictably forgot to take any photos with it...)

it's always a fantastic and worthwhile thing to do, but it's also an exhausting event to co-ordinate (so i think that next year it might just be someone else's turn to curate it...!)