Our December printed Tidings ran out of space so we post this contribution from Iain Ward here.
Thanks Iain, for the hard work you and all the team, each year again, put into making the church and lower Wivenhoe look so special!
The switch-on will be performed by the mayor at 6 pm on Thursday 5 December.
“Local traders have decorated their shops and businesses for Christmas since time immemorial, but the idea that they should be coordinated centrally with the church as the centrepiece was first initiated by Councillor Mary Hignall in 1999 during her term in office as mayor.
The main design was conceived by David Sleightholme, who designed and implemented the World War I soldier silhouette projected onto the tower for Remembrance in November 2018.
Quite when someone accidentally rigged one of the street decorations the wrong way up is lost in time, but the error became such a conversation piece that it is now traditional that one of the decorations should be upside down.
The light scheme on St Mary’s church tower is the most complex of the town’s displays – all the ropes, cables, copper poles, spotlights, wooden angels and other gear have to be hoisted up to the top of the tower every year and then be dismantled and lowered down again after the festival.”
Iain Ward
Participating families will pass the knitted Posada figures from one to another until on Christmas Eve during the Crib service they hopefully will be returned to St Mary’s.
when the church architect goes over the building and draws up a Repair and Maintenance to-do list, suitably prioritised. So there’s permanently a rolling 5-year R&M project underway and recently it was the tower’s turn.
The service was themed around bees, honey and the environment and featured a film clip of Pooh bear, a talk by Steve Allen, a bear in search of honey, lots of buzzing bees and the unveiling of the Wivenhoe Wildlife board in the churchyard afterwards.
