LIMA — If you are looking to get into the holiday spirit, you might want to check out the Allen County Museum.
The museum’s annual Christmas Tree Festival began Wednesday.
It’s an event that started when the museum first opened in 1972 and has been an ongoing tradition since then.
“What’s special about this year is the theme, ‘It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year.’ We challenge everybody to try and come up with a theme related decorating for their tree, so if you walk around and you look at the different trees you can kind of get a feel how they’ve selected their ornaments and the way they decorate their trees,” said Patricia Smith, executive director of the museum.
There’s plenty of trees for everyone to see, each one a bit different.
“We have 90 trees here in the museum this year. Of course we also have the MacDonell House, which is decorated with trees on in all of the rooms and in-between the two we have our log house, which is a pioneer theme and you’ll see re-enactors out there doing cooking. There’s live animals and so we have just a little bit of everything for everybody,” she said.
The Christmas Tree Festival has included many diverse groups.
“There’s Scout groups, all kinds of nonprofit groups, church groups, it’s just fascinating to see how the community has followed and participated in this event over the course of 45 years,” she said.
There’s more to do than just look at the decorated Christmas trees, there’s plenty of entertainment with different musical groups performing during the festival.
“I think our entertainment that we have here in the auditorium is also really terrific. There is dozens of groups that are performing over the five-day period and they’re just wonderful. It’s so much fun to just sit down and grab cookie and listen,” she said.
The Christmas Tree Festival runs through Sunday.
Hours are 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Thursday, 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. Friday, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Saturday, and noon to 5 p.m. Sunday.
Admission is free but donations are accepted.
Smith is hoping to break some attendance records this year.
“Last year we had an all-time high attendance of 28,000, so we’ll see if we can top that this year,” she said.
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