Village Society’s TreeFest Lights Up Holiday Season, Advances City’s Nonprofits

On a bright, wintery afternoon walk along W. Broad Street, Sat. Dec. 7, I was lured by the sparkling lights and glow of the annual TreeFest celebratory fundraiser under the awnings of Ireland’s Four Provinces (4P’s) in George Mason Square. 

Soon, I was chatting with leaders of the Falls Church Village Preservation and Improvement Society (VPIS), the sponsors of the event, where a score of local nonprofits and community organizations were raising critically-needed charitable funds by silently auctioning their creatively festooned table-top Christmas trees to the highest bidders, and networking with jolly attendees. 

The event – held annually ‘round the first week of December – is designed to coincide with “One of the Most Beloved Holiday Traditions in Falls Church,” the 4P’s annual Santa Brunch inside the classic Irish pub and restaurant’s cozy, cheerful, and seasonally-decorated spaces.

“Visitors to Ireland’s Four Provinces on December 6th and 7th enjoyed Christmas cheer as 21 beautiful table-top trees lit up the patio, during the annual VPIS-sponsored event to raise money for the benefit of Falls Church charities and nonprofits,” VPIS posted after the event on their website. “A choir group from Meridian High School provided carols.”

“The highest contribution went to the tree from VPIS.” Well-deserved. 

Participants at TreeFest had the chance over two days to vote on the best decorated Christmas trees and VPIS announced the following winners:

Most Beautiful – AAUW 

Most Imaginative – HOPE for Grieving Families

Most Artistic – Mary Riley Styles Library Foundation

Most Nostalgic – Friends of Cherry Hill 

Best Themed Tree – VFW

Other nonprofit groups participating in the event included: Arlington Philharmonic, Comunidad, Culmore Clinic, Ellie & Evangeline Foundation, Falls Church Arts, Falls Church Community Service Council, Inc., FCCPS Choral Boosters, Fisher House, Food for Others, Homestretch, Kids Give Back, Meridian High School Band Council, Meridian High School Environmental Club, The Kensington Falls Church (although a for-profit, their proceeds were donated to Homestretch), and The Learning Quest.  

TreeFest “gives a great awareness to all the nonprofits and charities in and around the City,” VPIS Board Member and President-elect Lorraine O’Rourke told me as she was dining inside with family members. “And part of what we do at VPIS is support other nonprofits and other charity organizations. It’s a community-based event.”

For O’Rourke, partnering with the 4P’s has worked out well for TreeFest these past several years. “We couldn’t do this without the 4P’s, because they’ve been a great partner for more than five years now, letting us host this here,” she said. “They’re a great supporter of us and we really appreciate the Four Provinces for letting us do this.” 

O’Rourke observed that it’s not necessarily all about the money for the nonprofits or VPIS. The real benefit of the event is raising awareness. “I think we get more benefit from people just being aware of how many nonprofits and how many charitable organizations are out there and probably [it’s] more of that than the financial part.”

Board member Keith Thurston – who had walked me inside to introduce me to O’Rourke – added, however, that for some nonprofits, the funds raised by TreeFest are nothing to shake a decorated Christmas tree branch at. “Well, it depends on the size of the nonprofits,” he said. “We had one nonprofit whose tree sold for $400 or $500 and they said of that one tree sale, ‘Wow, that was like 10 percent of our total budget for the year.’ So, they were very grateful on the money side, but most of it is visibility."

O’Rourke wanted to give a shoutout to TreeFest’s original founder, Melissa Morse, who gave VPIS permission to take over the annual event after she moved away to Georgia and started her own TreeFest there. “We were friends,” O’Rourke recalled. Morse “started [TreeFest] nine or 10 years ago and this was her event, but when she moved out of state, I contacted her and asked, ‘How about if VPIS takes this over? And she’s tickled pink that we’ve kept this tradition up.”

Thurston recalled some of the history of TreeFest in the City of Falls Church. “TreeFest originally was run in different places, the Community Center, it was in the Falls Church Arts space for a while, and then it was at the Hilton Hotel for one year on the second floor. And we settled on this space here [at 4P’s] because it’s visible from outdoors and we could accommodate all the trees here, so the Village Society took it over.”

Thurston elaborated on the evolving design-concept behind TreeFest. “So the concept is to give all the different nonprofits in Falls Church an opportunity for visibility. So they each decorate a tree and make it about their organization, or whatever they want to make it about. And we have brochures out for everybody. And we advertise it so that people come through who are going to the 4P’s, or they’re walking by and they come and bid on the trees and whoever the highest bidder is in the silent auction gets the tree at the end of the evening,” Thurston said. 

One year, Meridian’s Robotic Team sparked massive turnout to one of their team events by flooding TreeFest with their human team members to chat up participants.

In recent years, VPIS organizers have added participant voting on best decorations to provide more hands-on engagement, QR codes to supplement organizations’ blurbs, and even more entertainment wrapped into the multi-day event. 

They also allow high-dollar contributors a guaranteed tree. “So, typically the trees sell between $200 and $600, depending on two things, the decoration of the trees, and sometimes, the cause, because the cause itself will create high bids… and we have a few folks who are nice to us and every year they come in and we have a deal that if you bid $500, you can take the tree and walk. And every year, we’ve got two or three of our contributors who come and do it every time. And they’re not partial to any one organization. They rotate their generosity around to the different places.”

VPIS is considering returning to a three-day format, instead of just a Friday-Saturday event, but there’s a lot to plan. “We have music at the event. We have carolers come, they were here last night at 6 o’clock, we have bands play, and they were between 8-10:00 p.m. and the carolers also go in and they sing to the diners in the 4P’s, and then, this afternoon, we have the Arlington Philharmonic quintet or chamber group, they set up in the outdoors and they play, during the dinner hours,” Thurston said.

Attracted to the sense of community in Falls Church, Thurston moved to the City from Fairfax County in 1978 and has been active with the Village Society since 1989. “If you like the brick sidewalks, that’s the Village Society. If you like the tree-lined streets, that’s the Village Society,” he said, recalling VPIS’s storied history of community involvement since its founding in 1895. 

According to the VPIS website, the Village Society is an “active nonprofit citizen volunteer organization” in the City, “comprised of concerned citizens who address many important issues that face our community…. [And] works to preserve our natural and built environment, historic structures and landmarks, and promotes cultural activities.” Not only did VPIS plant many of the actual trees that make up Falls Church City’s “tree-lined” streets, following a major tornado in the early 1890s, but it was responsible for establishing the City’s first public lending library.

Due to his belief in the importance of providing “living history” to help preserve the City’s historical legacy, Thurston – a man of many hats – also helped co-found the Victorian Society of Falls Church. And he sits on the Board of Falls Church Arts.

When asked how this year’s TreeFest makes him feel, Thurston couldn’t help but think of the City’s and VPIS’s long history of supporting community. He thinks “about the quality of life and the sense of community here in Falls Church and remembering the history in Falls Church... We have 2.2 square miles, we have a tremendous amount of history in this little piece of land – or at least we say we do [Laughs] – We take every little bit of history we can and we make something out of it.”

O’Rourke and Thurston are hoping folks will visit TreeFest and consider donating to the sponsored charities next time they have a chance. 

“Come out and take a look at the trees next time when [you] have an opportunity,” Thurston said. “And you’d be amazed. Some people come to get their ideas for their Christmas decorating and it’s just wonderful because you get some decorators doing some of these trees and you think, ‘Oh my gosh, who would have thought of doing something like that?’ "

"We had a tree a couple of years ago, and it came from the schools foundation and they had a decorator on their board and they had this unbelievable peacock tree with the peacock feathers and the purple and aqua ribbons all over it and all the other contestants came in and said, ‘Oh no, don’t put me near that tree! Please put me somewhere else!’ [Laughs]. So, we try to be really fair about where the trees get placed.”

By Christopher Jones