Our Christmas Fair last year made £2,300 and we are only small and definately not affluent. Theses are some ideas we use.
Some of the mums get together from each year group over a few bottles of wine and have a Craft night.
We make decorations and Christmas tags.
Christmas gift bags with white take-away bags @7p each and decorate them with nice pictures cut out from Christmas paper or last years Christmas cards which we ask people to save and they are collected in January.
We make small Xmas stockings to hang on the tree filled with a little gift ie a rubber, a gold coin and a candy cane.
We fill pretty bottles with boots/Sainsburys own bubble bath and put a nice ribbon and home made tag on them.
Personalised pillow slips instead of stockings.
Lavender bags made from old school red tights, tied with a ribbon and a bell.
Lucky dip bags filled with £1 shop treats
We also give all the children in the school a half pint plastic glass covered in a piece of clear cellophane and secured with an elastic band to take home and fill with christmas chocolates. Then have tombola for 50p and the children love it.
Guess how many raisins in the Chistmas cake and the nearest guess wins the cake.
Christmas crosswords you can find on line are printed and sold for 50p. The correct ones are put in a sack and Santa pulls out a winner and they get a £5 book voucher.
We get 8 staff members including caretakers and dinner ladies and head teacher to put on a Santa beard, glasses etc. We take their photo then we have a Guess Who competition. Again the right enteries are put in a sack and Santa picks out a winner who wins a small sack full of goodies.
Our Secret Santa is fantastic and the children learn the art of giving and absolutely love it. They buy gift vouchers for £2-50 each in advance and then we have a secret shop dressed as a grotto were they come and buy presents for mums, dads, sisters, brothers, nans, granddads, aunts, uncles and friends. Gifts are bought in advance especially in the January Sales often for 50p/£1 (but original cost was £4 to £5) or from China eg shopping trolley key rings, watches, brooches ( source them from EBay) or half price radox/men's shower gel that was £2-50 in Boots/Tesco/Super Drug but we bought for £1-25.
They all get a gift bag (which is a decorated take-away bag described above) which we staple rather than them wrapping the gift and they write a gift tag which is attached to th bag. We made £800 from this alone last year and we only have 250 children in the school.
Hope this helps. X