Last week Saturday was the 27th annual Kent Winterfest. I run a Kent-based community on LJ, so every once in a (long) while, I will look at the city of Kent website and see if anything is going on that’s worth sharing with the community. The Kent Winterfest, while a bit cheesy with its block-long Santa parade and tree-lighting ceremony (and pet parade deathmarch), is still earnest and festive, so I dutifully passed the info along. In addition to Winterfest was a bulletin about the craft bazaar, which was billed as being “Not your grandma’s craft show” and “more of a gift show than anything”. In fact, after I posted about it to the community, the craft show organizer found it somehow and made his own post to the community, again selling his show as something extraordinary and out of the usual.

Sounds pretty good, right? I had gifts to buy, and this would be a place to get them all, save perhaps one or two picky boys, one of whom was dragged in my wake so it would have been impossible to buy for him regardless, particularly if I had to bully him into loaning me cash so I could do so–that sort of thing tends to dampen the spirit of giving a bit.

Guess how much shopping I got done? Go ahead. Take a moment and guess precisely how many people’s needs and wants I satisfied out of my extensive and varied list over the course of my visit to this gift show. No. Lower than that. Nope. Lower than that.

One. I bought one gift.

We were all of us deceived. This was no urban craft uprising. This was no gift show. This was my grandma’s craft show. I should know, having been dragged to show after show after show by my mom, who reveled in a style of home decor that can only be described as “horrible country handicraft cow nightmare”. This was room upon room of crochet snowmen and knit kleenex box covers and crappy scarves (I did not realize that just cutting an elongated rectangle out of fleece counted as a ‘craft’) and tacky appliqued sweatshirts and bedazzled jean vests…and it goes on like this! I saw weaselmom from across the room, our eyes met, we pointed at each other and bellowed “THAT BASTARD LIED TO US! CROCHET! CROOOOOOCHEEEEEET!!”

We chatted for a while, openly mocked the wares of the tables, cursed the name of the organizer, petted her cute little weasels which is totally not a euphemism, and then went our separate ways–I stopped by mschilepepper‘s booth and bothered her for a while (I should note that her wares are completely and totally high-quality and in fact I own and wear some of her necklaces and have purchased and gifted some to others)–apparently we had just missed amazoni whom I’m certain will corroborate my story about the quality of said craft fair. After chatting with Jeanine for a while, we made our way over to Kent Station, knocked another gift off my list, grabbed some coffee, and discussed our plans for world domination while we waited for the Santa Parade to begin.

The Santa Parade was indeed a short affair, but to its credit, it did again contain alpacas and some sort of princess. They also had Darth Vader wearing a Santa Hat. I also helped myself to some more alpaca-petting which is, again, not a euphemism. We decided not to wait around in the freezing cold to witness the tree-lighting, as it takes place an hour after the parade ends with really nothing going on inbetween, and instead made our way to Spiros for delicious gyros and then on to Shindig for super-delicious hot holiday booze to ease the sting of the craft fair and lying mcliarpants liartons.