By Colin MacGillivray
A GROUP of more than a dozen Lancefield residents dubbing themselves the ‘Christmas elf workshop’ is brightening High Street businesses with festive rooftop art.
For three years the group has created giant Christmas decorations to place on Lancefield businesses that wish to take part in the campaign, and the volunteers agreed this year’s decorations were bigger and better than ever.
People walking along the main street can observe anything from a turkey adorning to the butcher to a sack of toys on the bank or a reindeer and Santa on the milk bar.
A life-sized cut out of the Grinch is also lurking along the street, while Christmas elves hide among the trees on the High Street median strip.
Even Lancefield’s black panther statue has been incorporated into the celebrations, donning some reindeer antlers and being hitched to a sleigh that is big enough for children to sit in.
Group member Linda Davies said the decorations were spawned out of a friendly rivalry with neighbouring town Romsey.
“Romsey put trees up, and we were a bit jealous because as most people would know there’s a bit of competition between Lancefield and Romsey,” she said.
“We thought, ‘we can’t have Romsey looking better than Lancefield’, so it kind of started that way.
“Our team got together and thought about how we could make things differently. We didn’t want to just copy Romsey with the trees.
“We decided we would create rooftop art, so if a shop wanted it, we created it.”
Ms Davies said the group had made this year’s decorations in a shed at the rear of the Townhouse, operated by Lancefield Neighbourhood House.
“It was good that we had it [the decoration making] in town this year in the shed, because people would walk by and say ‘what are they doing down there?’ They could see who was doing it,” she said.
“Some people came and volunteered to help out.
“There’s been some nice comments. Somebody said they had just moved into town and they were really feeling the Christmas spirit.”
Ms Davies thanked builder Bruce Ferguson for helping put the decorations up.
She said the group intended to make the decorations bigger and better each year.
“More and more elves will pop up. We hide them everywhere and kids have fun going through the trees looking for them. We have a competition to see if they can count them all,” she said.
