Photos by Catherine Stachowiak
How would a church festival relate to car shows? Apparently when St Jude Catholic Church held its Annual Fall Festival, at its facility in Wofford Heights, it definitely related to a local car show, October 11 through October 13.
Angelo Halamandaris organized the event with the help of about 45 volunteers. He told the press, “I try to plan the festival at the same time as the rod run. And the reason is because that tends to draw people in from outside of the valley. I try to plan it so that we’ve got people coming in from out of town and it will bring in more customers.”
The parishioner was referring to the Kernville River Run Car Show, which Kenny Rhodes plans every year. Anyone driving to the popular car show could see the church quite easily, from the main highway, heading toward Kernville.
“We have nice food. Every year it’s people coming back,” Halamandaris told the Kern Valley Sun on Saturday. “Tomorrow after 10:00 mass we’ll be open.”
The event included many gift baskets with numbers on them. People bought raffle tickets and placed them in containers at each basket they wanted to raffle on. The baskets were festively wrapped and contained various kinds of items, including holiday kitchen oven mitts, and various types of foods, beverages, some wines and even a gardening set and a toy collection.
Halamandaris said, “They’ll take one basket up at a time and then Father will draw the winning ticket.” The church let winners pick up their winning baskets at the office following the event.
The Silent Auction during the event included a mountain bike, a baking mixer, a collector set of Christmas dishes, a white rabbit fur coat, among many other worthwhile auction items. About 2:15 Sunday their Silent Auction ended, cutting off all bids. “Whoever’s got the highest bid wins those items, so we announce those,” Halamandaris said.
The cash raffle the church held also included $1200 worth of cash prices, which was split between one $500 prize, two $250 prizes, and two $100 prizes. “In addition to those prizes we’ll have probably 20 or so merchant gifts and those get raffled. They’ll haul the (drawing) basket up there and then Father will draw the winning ones out of that basket. If you win a merchant gift, you win the gift but your ticket goes back inside for the money draw,” he explained.
The event has been held every year for the past 27 years. This was year 28. “We used to have an old church that was down on the other side of the parking lot over there. And that’s where the event started, in the old church. There are no remnants of that building at all,” he said. The parish was able to help fund its church buildings and adjoining facilities, in part, due to the Fall Festival fundraising event.
Halamandaris said it was his wife who started the gift basket raffle. The church has held its Silent Auction for the past 10 or 12 years. Crafty ladies have a sewing circle group, which meets Tuesdays at the church, making crafts to sell and give away. Men’s crafts at the Fall Festival included horseshoe sculptures and Christmas decorations. The food pantry sold some baked goods. Outside the building, the church held a yard sale the whole weekend, with furniture and various goods on sale.
