Festivals & Events
Christmas on Main Street Wellsboro’s Dickens of Christmas, a wildly popular Victorian-costumed street festival that brings thousands of visitors to town every year on the first weekend of December, has been going on for over three decades. Craft and food vendors vie with street performers and festooned streets for the attention of the holiday shopping throngs. But over the years, Ellen Dunham Bryant, president of the Penn Wells Hotel, and her sister, Ann Dunham Rawson, VP of sales and merchandising at the family’s Dunham’s Department Store, kept having to field the same question over and over again from happy shoppers and visitors: is there anything else after this weekend? Any more Christmas events? The town Christmas trees, marching down the center of the boulevard, still sparkled; the wreaths still hung fresh and bright from the gaslights. Ann and Ellen and Ellen’s husband Shawn (CEO of the hotel) would talk about it around the dining room table. Was there any way to extend that magical feeling that the town seemed so perfect at evoking, that feeling of a Christmas village? This is, after all, the Town That Saved Christmas, the town that, at the beginning of World War II, started producing Christmas bulbs when Germany shut down their exports. The Spirit of Christmas is something we’re good at. And so, last year, Ann and Ellen went up and down Main Street, asking what the other retailers thought. In this Amazon Era, what could they do to extend the local shopping season? The seeds of those questions immediately sprouted into a grassroots answer. With no budget—and no time to speak of—Main Street merchants responded with chocolate tastings and wine and cheese offerings. Santa was enticed to make an appearance at the Deane Center for the Performing Arts. The Arcadia screened a Christmas movie with tickets selling for a dollar. And this year, the weekend of December 9, they are doing it again. “It was a throwback Christmas shopping experience,” says Ellen. “More of a 1940s idea—shopping for Christmas locally, in a small town.” It was, she adds, “very much like an extended First Friday, but more geared toward shopping.” This year will be the same and then some: Highland Chocolates will have factory tours and an open house with Santa; Hamilton-Gibson Productions will bring A Fezziwig Christmas to the stage; The Fifth Season will bring Santa to the Deane Center for photos, where the Deane Center will also present a Christmas concert; a holiday-themed game night is planned at Pop’s Culture Shoppe; a live Nativity is in the works. Expect pop-up Christmas concerts by local musicians. Santa will be at the Penn Wells Hotel for brunch on Sunday. Stores all around town will be offering holiday surprises along with all the ease and pleasure of shopping local. And, in honor of our place in holiday history, historic Christmas ornament displays will be in shop windows up and down the town. For more information go to www.pennwells.com/things-to-do/events/Christmas-on-main-street.
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