All the trimmings of the season

Good to know that these gorgeous, meticulously decorated trees aren’t just Christmas eye candy. Even while standing as motionless as fashion models, broadcasting their tannenbaum chic and soaking up seasonal adoration, they’re also getting serious work done.

The 20th annual Festival of Trees is, as always, a gift to our community from sponsor the Vancouver Rotary Foundation and a fundraiser for the many good things that Rotary does, here and abroad, all year long.

Locally, Rotary helps around 20 students annually pursue their college dreams through approximately $80,000 in scholarship grants, spokeswoman Katlin Smith said. Many of the carefully vetted scholarship recipients are students who never could have afforded college without the help, and may be the first in their family to try for higher education, she said. Rotary also supports area agencies such as the Clark County Food Bank and a peer-to-peer youth mediation project.

Further afield, there’s clean water. The Vancouver Rotary Foundation is devoted to an ongoing project to distribute simple water purification kits to families in Mexico who are still drawing their water from sources such as streams and ponds, Smith said. Rotary has sent cash grants as well as members to Mexico to help, she said.

Those are just two examples of the Vancouver Rotary Foundation’s diverse, ongoing service activities. Founded in 1972, the group has given out $3.3 million in support of countless hands-on community projects and “every great local nonprofit agency you’ve ever heard of,” Smith quipped.

The Festival of Trees was launched in order to anchor Rotary fundraising to something durable and dependably popular, she said. Christmas seemed like a safe bet.

Santa by train

One dozen Christmas trees, lavishly and thematically decorated by local designers, will be raffled off at the end of this weekend festival. The trees have been on preview at Divine Consign, the downtown nonprofit furniture consigner, for the past month; starting today at 10 a.m. they’ll take center stage at the Hilton Vancouver Washington for the whole weekend. Raffle tickets are $5 apiece. Check out all the trees, decide on your favorite(s) and stuff the corresponding barrel with tickets before the drawing, which is set for 4 p.m. Sunday.

Birders might love the “Tweet Dreams” tree, inhabited by all manners of avian life and domiciles; public TV snobs will undoubtedly fall for the “Downton Abbey” tree, decked out with Union Jacks, Edwardian family portraits and even an accompanying yellow-lab statue; and train lovers will appreciate the “North Pole Express,” which comes complete with a working train that orbits its tree on a circular track. (And kids of kids of all ages will love the Southwest Washington Model Railroaders’ working replica of Columbia Gorge railway scenes, which will also be set up at the Hilton throughout the weekend.)

To further sweeten the deal, each tree comes with a long list of additional gifts, prizes and goodies that volunteers have amassed — such as vacation and recreation trips, theater and sports tickets, gift cards and certificates, clothing, home electronics and much more. Win the raffle and consider all your Christmas shopping done, Smith suggested with a sly smile.

These festival trees are all between 4 and 9 feet tall. If you’re interested in admiring something slightly taller, try today’s annual Community Tree Lighting in Esther Short Park, where the talent is just over 90 feet tall and gets decorated every year with around 9,000 lights.

Tree lighting festivities get underway Friday afternoon with train rides for kids, a community band concert, high school choirs joining in song and the annual tree lighting at 6 p.m. that draws thousands of people every year, Smith said.

Just beforehand, she said, Santa is booked to chug into the park by train.