Ideas for Christmas Fair

[onthebus]

I have somehow ended up involved with organising the Christmas Fair .
We've fallen into a rut of doing the same thing every year so am hoping for some new ideas to revitalise us. The school is for 3-7 year olds (infants + attached nursery) and has about 200 children. There are a lot of families on low incomes so we aim to price things as cheaply as possible. £500 profit would represent a good year (have fainted in shock at others' accounts of how much they raise at fundraising events).

Things we do at the moment are:

• visit to Santa
• cakes
• tea, coffee, squash
• hot dogs
• lucky dip
• various games: treasure hunt, throwing balls down Santa's chimney game, fishing for presents game, pick a lolly
• adult and child tombola
• 2nd hand toys
• tattoos

We also have some external stallholders come in who are charged a flat rate for a table.

We've thought about running a "on the day raffle" - we already run a big raffle at Easter and get good prizes from local businesses so don't want to duplicate that -were thinking of prizes along the lines of wine and chocs but don't know how appealing that would be or what we should cost it as.

Also had the idea of a nail bar, but not thought how it would work beyond that.

Be very interested to hear about stalls that work at your school, and also if anyone has any success (or otherwise) with smaller raffle or nail bar.

The raffle could be for stuff like a Christmas cake, Christmas pud, obligatory bottle of sherry, box of crackers, etc etc. Also get stallholders to donate something to the raffle as well as pay for the stall.

Will any of the flat rate stalls give you a % of their takings? Eg chocoholics, Phoenix cards etc often do this.

Good luck :-)

Chocolate tombola was our star attraction last year. Ask for donations before, buy extra if you don't think you've got enough. Normal tombola with 0 and 5 tickets winning.

Sold out after 1 hour so we are buying loads this year. Also works for all ages.

God, yes, the chocolate bola! The children at my DD's school LOVE it! They don't seem to mind paying £3 to win a fun-size crunchie! I would say but extra chocolate for it, it will make you a mint.

I've just joined the PTA at DD's infant school and we are currently planning our Christmas fair. Apparently one of the most popular stalls last year was the 'secrets room'. In November the school have a bad/mad hair day or non uniform day I suppose you could do and instead of taking in money they take a small gift for a man or woman (you get told which so have an equal amount of each) up to the value of 1.50. On the day of the fair, children pay 2 pounds to go into the secrets room without parents (are helped by staff or volunteers) they then choose a present for mum or dad (or both) and are helped to wrap and label it then take home for christmas. Sounds lovely and a good profit.

We do a chocolate tombola but the chocolate is donated by the pupils who get a non uniform day in return so pure profit!

Bottle stall
Maybe a raffle for a really nice xmas cake ( we have a lady who makes us one)
We also sell school calendars , every year group draws themself which is then made into a calendar ( we sell loads for presents at xmas)

our school had a teddy tombola at its summer BBQ - parents donated unwanted soft toys - although some children got a bit upset as they wanted a certain teddy

The big earners at ours are the tombola (we also have a non-uniform day to gather prizes), the home baking stall and our head teacher's baubles. The Head Teacher sits all day and writes the children's names (or whatever name they want) on a Christmas bauble with a gold or silver pen for a quid or so. For some reason everone loves it and it rakes in money.
For external stalls, we charge a flat rate and then 10% on anything they make over £200. Funnily enough, none of them ever seem to make more than £200. .

I like the secrets room idea.

At dd's old school one of the things the kids loved best was Santa's Workshop - an area with lots of little stalls priced for them rather than adults. Things like a tattoo/nail bar, decorating biscuits, making reindeer food, sweetie tombola, balloon pop - they picked an inflated balloon to pop, each had a number inside to show the prize.

We do the secrets room - it is the best stall of the entire fair - we start collecting from January advertising for unwanted but unopened presents that we can then re-use. We also go to the local big business for their 'marketing' crap items that they are no longer using (kids really aren't bothered if the pen they buy for their dads are covered in logos!) and then occasionally buy small items in (keyrings/notepads). It's a lovely stall, and the kids are so excited about being able to buy surprises for their parents.