Newtown Holiday Festival

Will Celebrate On Sunday Its

25th Anniversary,

 The Final Offering

In Its Current Presentation

By Shannon Hicks

The 2010 Newtown Holiday Festival — scheduled for Sunday, December 5 — will feature professionally decorated historic homes, a Victorian Tea, a Festival of Trees, and other family-friendly activities. The 25th annual presentation will run from 11 am to 5 pm.

“The 25th Annual Holiday Festival marks a quarter-century of family-friendly activities and celebration in support of Newtown Youth & Family Services,” said Festival Chairperson Layne Lescault. Newtown Youth & Family Services (NYFS) is dedicated to helping children and families achieve their highest potential regardless of ability to pay. The nonprofit agency combines clinical services and supportive programs to provide a continuum of care to residents of the greater Newtown area. For nearly 30 years, NYFS has offered specialized programs and services to individuals of all ages.

After this year’s Holiday Festival, according to Ms Lescault, the event will go through a dramatic overhaul.

“If we have any house tour aficionados, this is their final chance to do this tour for a few years at least,” she said this week. The Holiday Festival will drops its house tours and may even become a post-holidays event next year, added Ms Lescault, who is considering a winter carnival and more family-friendly activities beginning next year.

“I guess the saying ‘Every good thing comes to an end’ is appropriate here,” she said. “We’ve had a 25-year run with the house tours and that’s a long time. The house tours, popular as they are, still appeal mostly to women and girls. We need something for the boys and their fathers.”

Another issue with the house tours is logistics. There are only so many homes along Main Street, and not all homeowners want to open their homes for a house tour. Others are willing to open their homes, but ticketholders want to see different homes.

In the past, house tour committee members have appealed to homeowners just off Main Street, which has been successful, but also pulls traffic away from Main Street, where the holiday festival has always tried to focus its activities. For its finale, the house tour is offering three returning favorites.

“One of the homes on this year’s tour has never been in our holiday festival, which is very fitting,” said Ms Lescault. “We’re going out by offering a few favorites along with a brand-new offering on the tour.”

One thing Ms Lescault and NYFS are considering is a winter carnival.

“That may have to happen in January, of course, because we’ll want to make sure it’s going to be cold,” Ms Lescault said. “We may introduce house tours, but not for a few years at least.”

Meanwhile there is the 2010 Holiday Festival, with all of its activities convenient to Main Street (details below). Bus transportation will circulate to bring festival participants to the decorated homes on the walking tour.

Trinity Church, at 36 Main Street, will host its traditional service of “Lessons and Carols for Advent.”

Tickets are $15 for individuals and $25 for families (two adults and two children), with each additional child’s ticket $5. For Holiday Festival details, call 203-270-4335 or visit www.NewtownYouthAndFamilyServices.org.

Edmond Town Hall

45 Main Street

*Pictures with Santa and his Elf and Crafts for Kids will be held in the gym from noon to 2.

*Victorian Tea, with hot tea and baked goods (one scone and cup of tea with Festival ticket; $5 for an additional scone), will be in The Alexandria Room from 11 am until 4 pm. Young Newtown musicians will perform music, and the floral centerpieces being created by The Garden Club of Newtown will be available for purchase, with proceeds to benefit NYFS.

*T.J. Designs Show & Sale, featuring jewelry inspired by the late Tyler Jones. Tyler’s mother Linda has taken over the task of assembling jewelry items based on designs that Tyler made himself before his passing last year.

Ms Jones and some friends will be in The Mary Hawley Room, immediately off the town hall’s main lobby, with bracelets, necklaces, earrings, scarves, headbands, key chains, men’s bracelets, and Autism Awareness Jewelry. Proceeds are contributed to brain research for learning about the neurological disorder autism.

“We hope that through research, a cure or a prevention technique for this disorder can soon be found,” said Ms Jones.

*Performances of The Nutcracker Suite will be done in the theater at noon and 2 pm. Admission is included in a Holiday Festival ticket, or tickets for just the ballet will be available for $5 at the town hall’s box office, also in the main lobby.

The Malenkee Ballet Repertoire Company, the official ballet company of Newtown Centre of Classical Ballet, and its artistic director Jennifer Johnston will present a condensed version of the full-length ballet, which includes a story narration.

Trinity Church

31 Main Street

Trinity will host its annual “Festival of Lessons and Carols for Advent.” The service, open to everyone, will begin at 2 pm.

A century-old tradition established at Kings College in Cambridge, England, the Festival of Lessons and Carols is performed there and throughout the world every Christmas Eve and is broadcast to mil-lions of listeners.

The program invites those gathered to listen to nine lessons, each followed by carols. The nine readings are from the Old Testament of the Bible, all related to Advent and the birth of Christ. The Carols that follow each reading contain text related to the reading.

Church members will be presenting the Trinity Annual Ornament Sale, featuring Fair Trade ornaments. Large metal ornaments made by craftspeople in a Thailand village for a fair wage will be sold, with proceeds to benefit the 2012 Youth Pilgrimage. Ornaments are $12 each, or three for $35, and there are 19 styles from which to choose.

In addition, hot cocoa mix will be sold to benefit The Bishop’s Fund for Children, established by The Episcopal Diocese of Connecticut in 1994. The fund was created to enhance awareness of the plight of children at risk throughout Connecticut, to give Episcopalians in the state the opportunity to pray for children at risk, and to raise funds to underwrite social service programs that aid these children in urban, suburban and rural neighborhoods.

C.H. Booth Library

25 Main Street

*Entries for the Gingerbread House Contest will be on view on the main floor from 11 am until 4:30 pm, and winners will be announced at 5.

*The Festival of Trees will be the library’s Community Room, and will be open both Saturday and Sunday from 11 am. This is a raffle event of gift baskets, ornaments, gift certificates and other items, with tickets sold each day. Sales will stop on Sunday at 4:40, with winners to be announced at 5.

“This year we have a bumper crop of donations of every sort, including a doggy Christmas basket from Your Healthy Pet,” said Ms Lescault.

Ticketholders do not have to be present to win but must be able to pick up their prizes by 7 pm Sunday or between 10 am and noon on Monday at the library.

“Next to the house tours, the Festival of Trees is probably the most popular item with a devoted base of followers, not the least of whom are the library staff,” Ms Lescault pointed out. “I hope we can continue with [this event] in conjunction with the new format.”

Main Street House Tour

Consistently one of the biggest draws to the Holiday Festival is the walking tour of private homes decorated for the season (see Nancy Crevier’s story about the home decorators, preceding page). Expect lines outside each of the homes. House captains do their best to provide details about each home as well as keep the lines moving. The homes on the tour this year are as follows:

7 Main Street, a duplex that serves as the home Doug McDonald, and of Paul and Tracey McManus.

Built sometime between 1790 and 1800, this building is significant as an example of a late 18th Century structure. Said to have been used as an annex to the original Newtown Inn, it was moved to its present site when the inn was torn down in 1931 to build the Cyrenius H. Booth library.

The house boasts symmetrically placed chimneys on each end and a round arched window with a six over six sash at the north gable. Colonial Revival is evident in the two hip-roofed dormers at the front roof face and the one-story porch supported by six Doric columns which extend across the front.

32 Main Street, the home of Gordon and Williams.

The echoes of libation and dining resonate from this Federal Colonial-style home built circa 1765 by Caleb Baldwin. The house was owned and operated as a tavern and inn, and his son, Caleb Baldwin Jr, followed his father’s innkeeper responsibilities.

The Baldwin Inn was renowned for its food and was the site of the “final round-up” of the common flock of sheep in the early 1800s. From June to September, the flock moved along a prearranged route which used the best common land for pasture. When the sheep master ordered the disbanding in September, the Baldwin Inn was the site of the flock’s final break up for the year.

The colonial center hall has post and beam construction with a fanlight over the original door. The eight-room house has a fireplace in every room, and the current family room has a beehive oven.

This home was added to the National Registry of Historic Places in 2002.

38 Main Street, the home of Jen and Mike Sheehan.

This home was built in the Colonial Georgian form. Distinct features include a gable roofed pavilion with a Palladian window. Although the front section of the house was built in the late 18th Century, the balustrade at the front entrance is a late 20th Century alteration.

The house sits on one of the original home sites on Main Street. When the property was purchased around 1712 by Benjamin Sherman of Stratford, the land stretched as far north as the Matthew Curtiss House (44 Main Street) and as far east as Wendover Road, encompassing four acres.

Benjamin’s son Job was gifted the property and built the original house, the portion that now consists of the kitchen and bedrooms above it. The front two-story portion of the house was built in 1791 by Joseph Nichols.

Subsequent owners of this house included David Van Buren Baldwin, a grandson of Caleb Baldwin who lived at 32 Main Street (also on this year’s tour, as outlined above!) and a Mr Naramore, who lived there during the 1920s and 1930s and ran the Sunset Tavern, located on the corner of Currituck and Academy Roads.

This house has never, according to Ms Lescault, been on the Holiday Festival House Tour.

50 Main Street, the home of George and Shane Miller, a/k/a The Budd House, is a returning tour favorite.

This impressive three-story, Second Empire-style residence was built in 1869 by Henry Beers Glover and remained in his family for more than 100 years. Mr Glover, one of the founders of Newtown Savings Bank (and treasurer for most of the its first 15 years), was an active supporter of Trinity Episcopal Church, serving as a member of the building committee for the new church that was completed in 1870.

Unfortunately, Mr Glover did not live to enjoy his new house for very long. He died in March 1870 at the age of 45, leaving a widow and two daughters. Ultimately one daughter, Mary B. Glover, and her husband William J. Beecher became sole owners.

Upon their deaths, the house passed to their daughter Florence, who married Stephen E. Budd. Florence lived in the house all of her life, dying in 1977, which is why most Newtown residents know the house as the Budd House.

Among its distinctive exterior features are the classic Corinthian columns supporting its spacious front porch and the mansard roof decorated with patterns created by the varicolored and multishaped slate roofing tiles. At the time of its construction, this was one of the largest and most impressive homes in Newtown, reflecting the prosperity and social position of its builder.

The large Victorian is listed in the National Register of Historic Places as The Glover House.