Every year a member of the team at Hans Christmas Andersen Christmas tree farm at Santa Fir, just outside of Cranleigh, creates a beautiful garden next to their Santa’s Grotto.
This year they decided to involve members of the local community in the creation of the garden.
During November they invited local groups and businesses to fill a 12cm bauble with something that evoked Christmas to them. Each participant then made a donation to charity and entered the name of their charity of choice into a draw.
The names of the contributors to the new Bauble garden were added to Santa’s hat and he picked one out at random when he made his grand entrance to the Christmas tree farm on Saturday 1st December.
We were delighted to discover that the winning bauble was created by Andrea Bamford of Informed Choice!
Santa has made the draw for the Christmas Bauble competition. Congratulations to @InformedChoice who are donating the money to @cranleigharts! Thank you all who took part 🎅🏻 pic.twitter.com/J6wTfeUOaK
— Christmas Hans 🎄 (@ChristmasHans) December 1, 2018
We nominated Cranleigh Arts Centre as our chosen charity and we are delighted that they will receive the entire donation pot. Hans Christmas Andersen have generously matched the donations.
The Informed Choice Bauble contained a beautifully hand painted rock with a picture of a candle and garland set against a snowy window scene.
Andrea has become a local rock painting celebrity this year since she launched the Facebook group Cranleigh Rocks in conjunction with Cranleigh in Bloom.
The idea was to encourage Cranleigh residents young and old to decorate, hide and post photos of rocks and pebbles around the local area. It is a craze that has been increasing in popularity across the country and the Cranleigh in Bloom committee felt that it would be a fantastic way of promoting their work around Cranleigh by getting local families out and about.
Cranleigh Arts Centre tweeted their appreciation at the weekend:
Wow! A very big thank you to @informedchoice for donating us their prize from the Christmas Bauble competition & thank you @ChristmasHans for organising the draw! We are so lucky to have the support of these wonderful local businesses to help us entertain & inspire our community https://t.co/hOmnA5wPJ9
— Cranleigh Arts (@cranleigharts) December 3, 2018
At Informed Choice, we are proud to be involved with so many local initiatives and work closely with other organisations to foster a positive community spirit.
