Ten Thousand Villages Christmas Festival

So this weekend I'm helping run the annual Ten Thousand Villages Christmas Festival in Toronto at the Harbourfront Centre (235 Queen's Quay W).

This is a GREAT event and since volunteering to help with setup last night I've found I'm already in a much more Christmasy mood.

There are several reasons I'm blogging about this event.

1. I'm the volunteer publicity co-ordinator for the event this year...so yeah.. I better be marketing my own shindig!

2. I took some pretty awesome pictures of the setup night last night (see below).

3. You should seriously consider getting your Christmas shopping done before December 1st...cuz then you can enjoy spiked egg nog, chestnuts roasting on an open fire, the Colbert Report Christmas Special on Sunday night, decorating your house, sleeping, eating, breathing, not fighting with the crowds to do your shopping, and just in general having a better Christmas sesason doing Christmas things.

4. The money spent on your Christmas gifts at the Ten Thousand Villages Christmas Festival goes to help people all over the world earn a fair wage. A wage that helps them buy food, build a house, send their children to school, have clean drinking water in their village, seeds for crops so they can sustainably feed their families... you know...those things that we take for granted on a day to day basis.

5. You get to give twice. Once to your loved ones and then again to the artisan.

6. In an age where Christmas has become so commercialized it's nice to be connected to something that isn't really about profits and the latest marketing scheme. Yeah, that's right, Ten Thousand Villages is NOT-FOR-PROFIT (take that GAP and Old Navy with your slick ad campaigns!)

Anyways, enough of the jibba jabba... If you want to find out more check out the Festival's website or hit up Ten Thousand Village's page for more info about who they are and what they're about.






More soon...