Welcome to a special edition of Ida’s Kraft Korner. Enjoy! That’s it for now. Catch you on the flip side!

This weekend was our Mahoosuc Mills Down Home Holiday Festival. It’s always the second weekend of December, and people come from all over to experience our down home holiday fun. The St. Hyacinth’s Christmas Bazaar is part of the festival, and The Women Who Run With the Moose have a table down there where we sell crafts. It’s the second most popular booth at the Christmas Bazaar, if I do say so myself. The first is still the Blessed Bling Boutique. They rake it in. For some reason, the whole thing crept up on us this year. I think it’s because Thanksgiving was so late, and then we had that storm last week. Usually we …

Why don’t they have an express lane at Jo-Ann Fabric?! I mean, I was in there Saturday. All I needed some thread to match a button that had fallen off one of my sweaters, and the thread on the other buttons was a shade of blue I just didn’t have in my sewing kit. Isn’t that always the way?   I find my thread, no problem. Sure, I had to nudge aside an old lady checking out the fake flowers, and I may have hip-checked a kid playing with the ribbons (just kidding), but so far, so good. What I didn’t take into account was the fact that it’s a Saturday in late September, and …

Mahoosuc Mills is gearin’ up for our Down Home Holiday Festival. Used to be called the Down Home Christmas Festival, but we are now “politically correct.” The St. Hyacinth’s Christmas Bazaar is part of the Festival. I suppose we should change it to Holiday Bazaar, but hey, we’re Catholics! Who are we kidding? The Festival is a lot of fun. All the stores are open and the town is decorated real cute. The Kiwanis sell trees in the vacant lot where Pomerleau’s store used to be. There’s a horse drawn sled for the kids out in Bucky DuMont’s field. And on Enchanted Mountain, the bunny slope with a rope tow at the edge of town, …