Seeing is believing

Saturday was my first time decorating downtown with the Bigfork Elves. I moved here right after Christmas last year, so I completely missed the decorating and all of the other holiday festivities our village is known for.

My first reaction to seeing Bigfork all decked out for the holidays last year was that it was a fantastic marketing ploy. But like most things, there was more happening than just what was on the surface, no matter how colorfully lit up it was.

The photos we have printed on page B1 were done entirely by Camillia, so I could have slept in on Saturday. I could have stayed home, ate waffles and played video games until I was ready to actually function.

Instead, I got up at 6 a.m., chugged a protein shake, bundled up and headed downtown to see what all the excitement was about. All year I heard people talk about how much fun it is to decorate downtown with the elves, and for the last month or so not a day has gone by that at least one person had asked me if we were planning on taking photos of the event.

Needless to say, I was stoked to be there, and not for (newspaper) work, and I hadn’t even gotten to the free doughnuts and hot chocolate yet. If I’ve learned one thing about working here, it’s that if Bigfork is excited then I probably should be too.

It’s pretty rare when there’s something happening in Bigfork that I’m attending without my reporter hat. This time I traded it in for an “elf” one. There’s a pretty big difference between attending something to report on it and attending it because it’s fun. Fortunately the two tend to go together, the only difference being I didn’t have to ask name spellings when meeting new people.

At first it seemed like a chamber of commerce mixer, a lot of business owners were there, which made sense since it was their businesses that were getting the seasonal facelift.

I signed up to help Hilary Shepard, owner of The Mountaineer and an employee at Sotheby’s, decorate Rieke’s Bayside Gallery and Sotheby’s building since nobody else had picked that one and I was pretty sure she would know exactly what we needed to do.

And she definitely did.

There was a process that went with turning that building into something out of a storybook. Trees go against the support beams, garland on the rafters, and tree pruners can be used for everything.

I had no idea how to attach the lights to the garland, had I done it on my own I probably would have wrapped the lights around the garland and created a tangled mess for the un-decorating crew.

At first it was just the two of us, but within about 20 minutes we had a full-blown team that was able to complete decorating that building rather quickly despite some difficulties finding the hooks to hang the lights and garland from. When we were finished with that building I hopped over to Roma’s and Ken’s Coffee to help hang their garland too.

Being lanky has its advantages.

The thing I noticed while decorating downtown was that it didn’t take long for someone to step in and help out. Everyone, from kids shorter than their broom handles to the elderly. It was a team effort. Everyone helped everyone and everyone got along.

Now if only we could get our politicians to do the same.