By Shain Haug

Our thanks to the Mission Times Courier for posting the articles by which the Allied Gardens-Grantville Community Council communicates with our neighborhood. As evidence of how important these articles are, in response to our January guest editorial we welcomed four new members to the AGGCC board of directors: Ryan Ruff, Colin Truex, David Peterson and Brian Pearson. Their talents will be much appreciated.

In our last posting, I addressed some of the events and activities that the Council supports such as the Summer First Friday Concerts at the Park and the holiday lights on the flyover bridge. More on those matters in due course, but this month I will give you a more complete look at the Holiday Festival.

For 18 years, the Council and the Grantville-Allied Gardens Kiwanis Club have supported Bette Torre in her production of the Holiday Festival. On the Friday evening at the end of the second week of December, the festival brings children from Foster and Marvin elementary schools, their families, and members of the community to Lewis Middle School for choral presentations by the children from those schools; for dramatic Christmas, Hanukah and Kwanza readings; and for a raffle of Barnes and Noble gift certificates for the elementary students. These activities are accompanied by and centered around a concert performance by the Lewis Middle School Orchestra. The concert is followed by a reception at the school cafeteria where the orchestra members can meet the community.

The Holiday Festival is a great chance for our families to begin their celebration of the holidays, but Bette has given the festival a deeper purpose and a more important meaning: the opportunity for the youngsters from Marvin and Foster to see the Lewis Middle School orchestra members, all decked out in formal dress, with nothing more on the minds of the young musicians than the performance of beautiful music. The most important function of the festival is the opportunity for orchestra members to encourage the elementary students to join the Lewis music program and to make music a fundamental part of their lives.

Our most sincere thanks to Bette for the festival and for her devotion to the welfare of our community.

Writing this monthly missive about the events of our community is a new experience for me and I am not at all sure where it will take us. I would love to hear from you with your ideas, events of note, and matters around the neighborhood that you think will be of interest — things that will not otherwise get to the mainstream media. Along with those matters to which you may direct me, I hope each month to talk a little about one of the privately-owned local businesses – restaurants, dry cleaners, convenience stores, and the like — that are so very important to our daily lives (and that are generally not much further away than a brisk walk).

––Shain Haug is vice president of the Allied Gardens-Grantville Community Council. Reach him at [email protected].