September is here and every year at about this time I am stricken with an urge that I must fight: the urge to gear up for craft fairs. I live in New England so around here they are particularly abundant. It all started back in college. My school had this very, very long hallway through the main building, affectionally known as “The Infinite Corridor”. For some modest fee, I think it was 10 bucks, they’d let the students set up a table to sell crafts. Every year, my broke friend and I would scheme about what we could sell to make some much needed holiday cash.
The first year, our efforts were modest but rewarded. We bought mini Christmas ball ornaments from an actual Five and Dime and made them into earnings. This is something anyone can buy at Target® now, but at the time it was relatively innovative. Unfortunately for us, these were super cheap to make and sold relatively well. It was the beginning of our downfall. Due to their relative success, we decided next year we’d do something even more grand. We decided to make fancy Christmas stockings, the kind that looked like old Victorian boots and were made from cool upholstery style fabrics decorated with beaded trim and lace. As much as it was against our nature, we started early and made lots of stockings.
The week of the highly anticipated craft fair came, and our hopes were dashed. No one wanted to buy cool Christmas stockings. We surmised that maybe college students were “too grown up” care about stockings anymore. We started planning for next year. This time, we’d make cute little stuffed animal ornaments, like puppies and kitties (even pigs!) with little holiday hats. These proved to be incredibly time consuming, but as college students we figured our labor being “free” was acceptable. Again, our hopes were squashed. That year, we discovered a disturbing turn of events at the craft fair: some enterprising graduate student was simply buying trays of samosas from a local Indian restaurant right across the street, marking them up to $1 each and selling out before lunch. Outrageous! These were not even “crafts”! We were furious but determined. Before that year’s fair was even over, we hatched a new plan.
The next morning, we arrived still with our cute puppy ornaments but also armed with pans and pans of baked goods. We made my friend’s famous Apple Sauce Cake and Carrot Cake in abundance and sold them for $1 per slice. We figured we were better than the Samosa Lady (she predictably came back the next day) because we at least provided napkins which we’d of course commandeered from the cafeteria. We sold out. We ended up making 80 bucks each that year, a veritable fortune at the time.
I still have one of the stockings my friend made all those years ago: a super cute faux fur dalmatian print stocking with ruffles and fake pearls. I still put it up every year. It serves not only as a reminder to never participate in a holiday craft fair again, but also as a token of our dear friendship which is still going strong after 35 years!
