Christmas Market Oklahoma

When we first started this event the idea was not to make money but to help others make some holiday spending money.  Booth fees at Marland Mansion’s Oktoberfest are $250-750. That rules out some little person who makes some homemade craft and doesn’t know whether it will sell.  Similarly, other craft fairs strive to make as much as possible for whoever puts them on.  So our idea was to do something for the community, allowing hobbyists and folks with some art or craft to sell for a day and this is how some really serious businesses get started.  We also help with sales taxes for the Oklahoma Tax Commission.  Christmas Mkt. is an incubator of sorts.  That has worked very well.

Another idea was to have fun.  Have German food, a German Christmas market knockoff, and a place to shop for very unique Christmas gifts and cookies.  Here we have found things we hadn’t anticipated.  The school kids all get higher than a kite when they see the campus decorated.  This year we added hot drinks and sold 240 bierrocks.  Humorously, we had to explain that a bierrocks is a “German meat pie”.  All the powwow attendees suddenly smiled and bought several.  The women’s guild makes a hot soup German dinner, about as tasty as it gets.  And the newspaper put a photo of Roosevelt School dancers on the front page.  We think the music thing will grow with time.  Pictures with Santa were non-stop.  And several churches had booths of crafts too, among which were some extraordinarily cheap gently-used ornaments. We’d love to have every church in town participate and help sponsor the event.    

And there were sideline benefits.  Principal Dave Birnbaum was quick to see advantage to having material to hand out to families about the school.  This year we had about 40 folks involved from 6 sponsoring churches and civic groups, putting the program together.  Money from booth fees goes to the school scholarship fund and several of the parent recipients jumped in to help out as well.  Now here’s an interesting thing.  Oklahoma has a law that no charter schools can be established by the state outside of Oklahoma City and Tulsa.  So the only school choice small town Ponca City folks have is the 3 very good parochial schools. Yet polls show the top concern of parents is “school choice” by a 68-71% vote.  Thus the scholarship program is an important contributor helping about 25 families. 

LWML sells cookies on their Cookie Walk, a splendid assortment that was sold out by 2 pm.  They give the money to mission projects, both Oklahoma and international.  And they grossed about $2000. The women’s guild made about $700 and they use the earnings to buy groceries for the funeral dinners they do for free for both members and non-church associates. The Youth group made about $400 with their food sales. There were also about $800 of other food sales and $2800 of booth fees (89 vendors).  Together with Conoco and Phillips community service grants the total should run somewhere around $10,000 for the sponsors and church-associated groups. 1500-2000 attendees were estimated and $20,000-25,000 in total sales.  So this represents roughly $1500 of sales taxes for the city and state.

And as usual, we had a lot of fun.