The Festival of Wreaths put the finishing touches on another successful year with their auction night on Dec. 7 at the Humboldt and District Gallery.
This year’s Festival of Wreaths celebrated its 18th anniversary with 21 live auction, and 129 silent auction items, as well as 28 jiggle bottles.
Seeing so many items from the community was great, noted museum supervisor Jean Price, who says it really shows how supported they are by the community.
“It shows that they’re interested in what we do and they value what we do. So we’re always so pleased when the donations come in.”
The Festival of Wreaths was hosted once again by the Friends of the Museum and Gallery, and while total numbers have not been finalized, Price notes the money raised will help cover some arts and culture programming hosted by the museum and gallery. Their big initiative over the last couple of years has been the concert series, says Price.
“We’re always presented with new and exciting opportunities for programming, bringing in an artist or something like that. So we’re always super excited when the friends are able to help out with those sorts of things.”
The gallery was full of bidders during the auction night, as well as staff from the Humboldt Scotiabank who graciously donated their time to help volunteer during the course of the evening.
In addition to their time donation, the Humboldt Scotiabank also pledged to match a percentage of the funds raised during the course of the evening, which was great to see, says Price.
“Their support will really contribute to what the friends are able to do… so we’re really pleased, and really pleased to have the volunteers here as well tonight to help out with everything,” she said.
“We’re really very thankful and grateful to the Scotiabank for doing that.”
Overall, Price was pleased with how the evening went, noting the crowd was great.
“They had a good time. We’re really grateful to Val Kirsch for coming in and being the auctioneer. We’re always grateful to everyone who comes in and puts bids down.”
Also during the evening, the Museum and Gallery paid tribute to longtime Friends president Louise Miller, who passed away earlier this year.
Miller was part of the group who first brought the Friends of the Museum to Humboldt in 1994, and sat on the board as president until a couple of years ago.
Miller also played a role in the creation of the Festival of Wreaths.
“We thought well we’ll try it and see what happens and as you can see 18 years later it’s still really going strong. So we really wanted to honour Louise and the work she did and the commitment,” noted City of Humboldt’s Director of Cultural Services, Jennifer Fitzpatrick.
Miller was a “fantastic” member of the friends, says Fitzpatrick who notes that when she first asked Miller to serve as president she did not tell her she had to stay for approximately 20 years.
“We wanted to honour that by just having some quilted items in the auction tonight and also the 2018 raffle,” says Fitzpatrick.
“Louise epitomizes all the volunteers that we have because as you can see we get a lot of donations from the community but it also takes a lot of volunteers to run this event. Without all the people working in the background we just couldn’t make this happen.”
Price would like to thank everyone for helping make this year’s festival another success.
“Thank you to all of the donors, all of the people who bought items tonight in the live and silent auction and just thank you to the friends in particular for all the work they do for the museum.
