Tree festival set to take flight

Files /The Columbian Visitors to the Vancouver Rotary Foundation’s Festival of Trees will be invited to vote on the designs submitted by Clark County nonprofit groups. Six of the designer trees on display in the Holiday Decorations Showcase will be auctioned at a Nov. 29 gala fundraiser.

November 27, 2005 Janet L. Mathews/The Columbian Sasha Santo, 10, of Portland, Ore., foreground right, and her sister, Elly (cq) Santo, 7, look at decorations at the Festival of Trees, Vancouver Hilton, on Sunday.

Jackie Moghadam 4, from Camas, takes a close look at a tree titled "Just An Old Fashioned Christmas" at the Festival of Trees held at the Hilton Convention Center, Saturday, November 25, 2006. (The Columbian, Steven Lane)

Shelley Bruton, of Vancouver, strolls through a virtual forest of trees with her daughter, Cydney Bruton, 5, at the Festival of Trees at the Hilton in downtown Vancouver on Saturday November 24, 2007. The annual event raises money for Rotary foundation. (The Columbian, Zachary Kaufman)

When Vancouver’s Tina St. John was asked to help come up with a theme for a decorated Christmas tree representing the Caring Ambassadors, she immediately thought of her daughter’s origami cranes.

The cranes are a symbol of long life and health. One legend prescribes that if you make 1,000 paper cranes, your wish will come true, St. John said.

When the staff at Affordable Community Environments, or ACE, went through the same exercise, they turned to the Fruit Valley neighborhood where the Vancouver-based affordable housing group plans an $11 million mixed-used project with 48 units. Together ACE and elementary school teachers at Fruit Valley Community Learning Center came up with the idea of asking the students to make ornaments incorporating self-portraits of their families.

Arc of Clark County and the Children’s Home Society of Washington planned trees adorned with photos of the people they help.

The nonprofit groups’ decorating efforts will be part of the Vancouver Rotary Foundation’s Festival of Trees event this year.

The Festival of Trees has always been about showcasing different kinds of beauty to raise money for groups that help improve the lives of Southwest Washington residents.

Traditionally, Clark County designers decorated most of the Christmas trees that were put on display for the public to enjoy and then were auctioned to raise money for the foundation.

This year the Festival of Trees’ organizers wanted to do things a bit differently. Designer trees will still anchor the event, but they will share the spotlight in the festival’s Holiday Decorations Showcase with the 17 themed trees from area nonprofit groups.

“The idea came about as a way to keep the event fresh and get more nonprofits involved with the foundation,” said Temple Lentz, executive director of the Festival of Trees.

Including the community groups’ trees in the Holiday Decorations Showcase also gives the nonprofit organizations a way to share who they are and what they do with the public.

The nonprofit groups came up with a wide range of themes from the Caring Ambassadors’ “Caring Cranes -- Wings of Hope,” and Children’s Home Society’s “Turning Hope into Reality for Over 100 Years” to the Arc of Clark County’s “You Know Me” and Washington State University Vancouver’s “A Crimson & Gray Cougar Holiday.”

Those who attend the festival and tour the Holiday Decorations Showcase will be able to vote for the tree they like best in exchange for a $1 donation.

At the end of the event, the nonprofit group that gets the most votes will receive a third of the donated money. Another third will be split between all the groups that participated and the balance will go to the Vancouver Rotary Foundation, Lentz said.

Six of the themed trees created by designers for the Holiday Decorations Showcase will be auctioned at the Nov. 29 Holiday Carnivale Gala. Among them will be a “Tool Time” tree decorated with power tools and extension cords and a “Holiday Dinner Party” tree outfitted with the accouterment necessary to host a dinner party for eight.

The process of picking themes and decorating the trees has had a magic of its own.

For Ace, the project was an opportunity to have fun with the community it serves and celebrate some of the students’ cultural heritage. An art teacher at Fruit Valley Community Learning Center asked fourth and fifth graders to make the self portraits that will be used in some of the ornaments. Second and third graders at the school made ornaments using Mexican metal tooling and first graders made Russian dolls.

“The community is centered around children and we wanted our project to be centered on the kids as well,” said ACE Executive Director Leah Greenwood.

For Caring Ambassadors, the paper cranes that were selected for their symbolism have already inspired a spirit of sharing. Some of the cranes used to decorate its tree came from a classroom in Japan that made the cranes in memory of atomic bomb victims. Caring Ambassadors will include a tray of cranes at the base of its tree so that Festival of Trees visitors can take cranes home to decorate their own trees.