Making the Rounds
The smell of fresh evergreens mingles with the scent of coffee perking in the urn as the women arrive for a long day of work.
Noble fir boughs cover tables in the cold gymnasium along with pine cones, acorns, pinon pods, cattails, carob pods, pomegranates and eucalyptus leaves gathered from across the rustic valley.
The 60 women, members of the Ojai Valley Garden Club, pick up their glue guns and begin making Christmas wreaths.
By day’s end, they have finished more than 300 wreaths that should bring them more than $4,000 for year-round beautification projects. “With that money we tend the rose garden in Libbey Park, the gate at Nordhoff Cemetery, the Ojai Library planters and its bedding plants, and we decorate the front of the post office,” club member Ginger Wilson said.
The club’s annual wreath-making marathon didn’t start out as a women-only project 25 years ago. But it evolved into one.
Now women do all the wreath-making tasks, except for the heavy lifting and maybe the electrical chores, Wilson said. “A few of our husbands, like mine, become honorary members by setting up the work tables in the gymnasium before daylight.”
They also helped cart over the huge boxes of noble fir boughs imported from Washington state, which Ojai’s Starr Market stored in its grocery cooler following an early delivery Nov. 28.
After dawn last Monday, five-dozen women “of a certain age,” as one member described herself, padded into the unheated gymnasium at Chaparral High School clad in sweatshirts, grungy warmup pants and sensible shoes, glue guns at the ready.
They were prepared to work a 12- or 14-hour shift--whatever it took to make hundreds of holiday wreaths.
“The fir comes down from Washington, everything else we steal,” deadpanned head wreath maker Florence Vernand, referring to club members who trod around town, heads down, looking for the berries, pods and leaves used to make the wreaths.
No one was worried about unsold wreaths. There has never been one. The club already had orders for 270 wreaths before its workday began. They sell out year after year.
By 7:30 p.m., the end of the marathon, 304 wreaths were finished, glue guns empty and fingertips sore from the pricks of pine needles and cones.
The finished wreaths were inspected by the club’s quality control committee.
“They give every wreath a good shake before hanging them up to go out,” said President Lois Brannan. Friend’s Ranches in Ojai took about a dozen wreaths to sell at its tree lot and the remaining wreaths that were not pre-ordered were sold outside the high school at the end of the day.
The club could sell many more of its natural wreaths, Wilson says, “but we only have 60 active members. Some of us are getting grayer.”
“But I’m not getting better, I’m getting slower,” added Molly Bogart, whose supply of dwarf red pomegranates was coveted by nearby wreath makers.
“In the beginning years, I did 10 a day. Now I’m down to five.”
