New Christmas event spreading cheer in Fair Grove

FAIR GROVE, Mo.- Christmas is in full swing in the Ozarks, including in Fair Grove as they hosted the first Christmas on Main Street Saturday afternoon. 

Christmas shoppers were able to pick up some last-minute gifts from vendors and enjoy live entertainment after watching the parade.   

“Here in Fair Grove, we've been trying to kind of dress up Christmas. Several years ago, several of the merchants got together and said, let's create an old-time Christmas in this town,” Tim Ritter said. 

Over a year's worth of work and planning led to the first-ever Main Street Christmas event. 

“This year, they decided to pull out all the stops and said, ‘Well, what else could this be? Why don't we just kind of imagine where we could go with this, what we could turn it into?’ And what happened today is the culmination of all that,” Ritter said. 

“Fair Grove is so special. We have our old-timey buildings; we have the Christmas lights. It's just that small, like a very Americana feel,” Anna Sutherland said. “And so, we wanted to take that and really do something special.” 

Sutherland attended and helped plan the event. She says that local coffee shops, boutiques and other vendors played a role in transforming Main Street into the Christmas market. 

“This was such a community collaboration. Started off with 'Let's have vendors, maybe we add a hayride, let's have a bounce house, a live nativity,'" Sutherland said.

While this is only the first year of the event, Sutherland says they are already looking forward to what is next.

“We feel like that we have laid a really good foundation. We have found what works, what doesn't work, what we need to tweak,” Sutherland said. “So I'm really excited going forward that this is something that we can really grow and expand upon.” 

While the event has wrapped up now, organizers say the Christmas lights and decorations on Main Street will remain up throughout the holiday season.