The St Thomas’s ONLINE Christmas Tree Festival
- Keeping the spirit of Christmas before us all
Every year for the past 15 years St Thomas’s Salisbury has celebrated Christmas with a wonderful Festival of decorated trees and nativity scenes. This has been one of the biggest and best attended events of its type in the UK, with over 100 decorated trees and nativity scenes. Sadly, in this very difficult year, the church is not able to physically display any trees, perform live music or personally welcome all of the local community, and others from further afield, who regularly and avidly support the Festival.
But the show will go on and this year our Festival is to go ahead, but with a ‘virtual’ difference – online. Like most of the local community the church is adopting the benefits of modern digital technology to, once again, bring people the best of Christmas creativity.
As usual local organisations, companies and individuals will all apply their talents and loving care to present a colourful display of wonderful decorated trees, nativity scenes and music – all to raise money for nominated local charities. This year The Jo Benson Day Centre for Disabled Adults, and The Salisbury Child Contact Centre are the supported local causes. Last year over 15,000 visitors to the Festival raised a considerable amount for local charities.
This year, though our specially created website, visit: http://tomtreefest.org.uk/, visitors will be able to see not only wonderful decorated trees and Christmas scenes, but also be able to hear festive music. The Church has asked local choirs, music ensembles and individual musicians to perform and record seasonal music that visitors can select and play back through the Festival site.
After enjoying the visual and aural ‘virtual feast’ visitors will be encouraged to help contribute to local worthy causes. Donating will be easy thorough a specially constructed, secure payment facility.
Details of the Christmas Tree Festival and other Christmas events are available on www.stthomassalisbury.co.uk