Despite the COVID-19 pandemic, the Chamber of Commerce of Belle Glade hosted its first ever Holiday Small Business and Craft Fair.
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BELLE GLADE — Despite the COVID-19 pandemic, the Chamber of Commerce of Belle Glade hosted its first ever Holiday Small Business and Craft Fair on Saturday, Dec. 5, inviting local residents to sign up who had “a hidden talent for making things, or a small business ... to promote.”
They ended up with over a dozen different local vendors, artisans and businesses joining in, hawking everything from “Scenstsy Gifts,” such as Young Living Essential Oils, to homemade, hand-crafted gifts of jewelry and knickknacks and home decor items. There were plants and garden items, too.
The Belle Glade Chamber hosted the gathering starting at 8 a.m. Saturday at the corner of Main Street and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd. In conjunction with the event, the reopened Lawrence E. Will Museum was open for public browsing all morning until the scheduled end time of 1 p.m.
There were children’s activities outdoors on the museum grounds — decorating fresh cookies, writing letters to Santa and decorating a special Christmas ornament, just to name a few!
A fire truck bearing Santa Claus arrived around 9:30 a.m. and, said the chamber’s Santa-elf-chief Melanie Grimes (executive director) and assistant-elf-chief Brenda Bunting, and that’s when the steady stream of parents with kids in tow began showing up.
Grimes said Monday: “The event, I think — for our first one — went pretty well. We had about 15 vendors there, and it was steady. Everybody was socially distancing, so it was kind of spread out a lot, outside on the grounds. We did have quite a few members of the public come out.”
In the late morning, it got busier, Bunting said. “We didn’t have big crowds but we had a steady flow of people coming through,” Grimes said.
“I think if we’d have been closer together, it would have seemed like there were more people here, but everybody was so spread out, and we were distancing everything to keep it outdoors, and then they opened everything.
“We’ve learned a few things, like don’t start it at 8 a.m.!”
The weather was nice enough on Saturday morning that activities were not forced inside, but people were encouraged to go inside and tour the Lawrence E. Will Museum’s offerings as well.
Grimes said they will plan things a little differently for their next holiday craft fair in 2021, when everyone hopes social distancing may be a thing of the past.