A glorious sunny morning on Sunday 19th November brought crowds of people to Jalon Valley Help’s Christmas Fayre at the Rastro site in Jalon. If I hadn’t seen Santa Claus, with his Elf helper, wandering through the crowd and heard the Let’s Singalong friends performing their Christmas songs and carols I could have imagined it was a summer fayre, but without the super-hot heat we had this summer. Everybody was walking around enjoying the sunshine, searching for those early Christmas gifts and competing at the games and lottery stalls, buying beautiful cakes and jams to take home for their afternoon tea.

There were stalls selling everything imaginable from knitwear and cushions, knitted children’s toys, teddy bears, Christmas decorations, paintings, jewellery, clothes and bric-a-brac. The games included the Wheel of Fortune, Bottle Stall, Guess the Weight of the Cake, Lucky Ticket/Win a Prize and of course the fabulous JVH raffle. Father Christmas’ grotto was very busy with young children queuing for the chance to make their first Christmas wish for this year.

The wonderful sunshine helped the feeling of everybody having fun and being pleased to be out which complements JVH’s aim, which is to help anyone in need in our community. JVH offers the loan of medical equipment, an opportunity to meet, support in attending hospital visits etc and wherever there is a need JVH is there to help.

When I spoke to Richard Green, the JVH President, he said the charity was continuing to look at new ways of helping people in need, currently they are looking to buy more medical beds, which are so important to enabling patients to be released from hospital to convalesce at home.

So please support your local charity, which is based here in the Jalon valley, please use their shops and support their events so that they can do what they are best at – supporting anyone in need in our community.

Article by Peter Sockett
Photos by JVH