Icy weather puts a chill on Oxford’s Christmas in the Country

You spend all year preparing for your hometown’s one big event, a two-day country Christmas festival – and when it finally arrives, you have an ice storm that keeps people home.

That was the situation this year for Oxford’s Christmas in the Country, the tiny Sumner County town’s annual Thanksgiving weekend celebration.

The ice storm hit just in time for Friday’s opening day, and although the roads to the town were essentially clear by Saturday morning, travel warnings persisted and scared away visitors.

The traditional horse-drawn wagon rides through town were canceled, there were empty spaces at the crafts show because several out-of-town merchants decided not to make the trip, and the lunch rush at the Oxford Christian Church’s pulled-pork sandwich feed was about a dozen people.

“When you have weather like this, it just really gets in the way of all your activities,” said Todd Eflin of Oxford Roasted Coffee, who is also president of the Chamber of Commerce, which organizes the annual festival.

Eflin said he’ll go to his fellow chamber members with a proposal to hold a third day of Christmas in the Country between now and Christmas to give local and regional crafters a second chance to sell their products.

Held annually on Black Friday and Small Business Saturday, the festival is an effort to “draw people who are not into the big-box atmosphere,” Eflin said.

Local residents work for weeks, months and, in some cases, all year making the crafts they sell at Christmas in the Country, he said.

As at the other booths, business was slow Saturday at his coffee stand in the Lion’s Club building, which usually bustles with activity during the festival. But he had it better than some others, because there was some demand for hot beverages.

“I’ve sold more individual cups and less pounds of beans,” he said.

Liz Shepard of Arkansas City bought both. She wasn’t letting a little ice ruin Christmas in the Country for her.

“It’s tradition,” she said. “The weather doesn’t seem to be that bad.”

At the crafts-show building next door, sisters Donna Wunderlich and Kathy Simmons chimed in with “the weather outside is frightful” as Wunderlich worked on a quilt and Simmons ate lunch.

The sisters, from Atlanta, Kan., had attended the festival in the past and this year got their own booth to sell Wunderlich’s hand-painted letter blocks and Simmons’ antiqued wood furniture, which she jokingly referred to as “refinished old junk.”

“I’m thinking it’s not a record crowd,” said Simmons, showing a gift for understatement.

It was definitely a downer for Sheli Grundy of Haysville, who sat at her booth making hand-painted and hand-lettered paving stones, although she’d sold only two through midmorning Saturday.

Grundy said painting the stones is more hobby than business but that she had hoped to make at least a few more sales on Saturday.

Christmas in the Country was only her second crafts show, and she said it could be her last.

“I’m not going to make it a future job, that’s for sure,” she said.

This story was originally published November 28, 2015 at 7:30 PM with the headline "Icy weather puts a chill on Oxford’s Christmas in the Country."