JMB, Plan B

For many years now the Shire of Reengarda has been using Allégården for our events. This is an old schoolhouse in the village of Burträsk which has a decent kitchen, a gym big enough to serve a feast for 50 people, and a couple of old classrooms that had been set up with bunk beds to sleep 14 people each, plus extra floor space for people bringing their own bedding. I have always loved events there, and always looked forward to the next.  Alas, after the pandemic and in conjunction with increased electric costs and other inflation the price of the site had gone up and up.  When we used it for Oktoberfest I, as event steward, had a stressful few weeks watching the registrations come in only slowly, till we finally got enough people registering to cover the cost of the hall and food (that event made a profit of 50 Sek, which is less than €5, and also less than $5 USD). The site has recently changed ownership, and the new owner agreed to let us use it for the same price as in October, and our event steward (not me this time), set a budget that needed 35 people registered in order to break even.  This should have been doable. Before the pandemic that would have been a small event. Even now that should have been easy to achieve. However, it turns out that many of our local members couldn't make it for a variety of reasons that had nothing to do with one another.  By two weeks out we had finally gotten enough registered that we could have paid for the site, but not enough to pay for any food.  However...

When I started classes at the local Folkhögskola here in Lövånger I fell in love with the Församlingshem in which we have our classes. It a beautiful old timber house, and my very first thought when I saw it was "I want to hold an event here!". So three weeks before the event I spoke to the people in charge of the building, found out that the cost to rent the hall is more affordable by nearly an order of magnitude, and set up a tentative booking, saying that our registration deadline is in one more week, if we don't get the numbers we need by then, I will let them know, and we will switch to this site.  We didn't, I did, and we did, and I am very, very happy with the result.

Because this site belongs to the local church they have a no alcohol policy. They also are set up with an alarm that turns on automatically at 23:00 every evening, and they aren't set up for sleeping on site. Therefore we devised JMB, Plan B. Keldor and I opened our home on Friday night for all who wanted to "sleep on site". I baked a bunch of bread rolls, and made a simple blended vegetable soup to share, and a small group of us spent a delightful evening telling stories. They did a tasting of mead and other things, and I worked on a project.  At 02:00 those of us still awake decided it was time to call it a night, and I was in bed by 02:30, after tidying up a little in the kitchen so that the morning would be easier.

Saturday morning we loaded up the car and drove the couple of minutes to site through the thick new snow that had fallen during the night (a couple of people chose to walk), and made ourselves at home for the day. During the day we had people working on a variety of projects, including sprang, sewing, altering, calligraphy, illumination, leather work, some people tried playing my hammer dulcimer and a few people played board games. Reengarda provided lunch--soup made by adding water and vegetables to the leftovers of the soup from night before, and the last of our bread rolls.  Then we resumed our crafts and games, and the conversation flowed. At 16:00 we had a potluck feast, with many good contributions, followed by a pleasant evening of more socialising, games, crafts, and light saber battles. 

Then we packed things up and cleaned the site, and locked the doors about an hour before the alarm would have gone off. Some people returned to their own homes, and a few of us returned to our house, where we sat up only a little while, so that I was in bed by midnight.  Normally at our JMB event Sunday morning is waffles, because JMB stands for Jungfru Maria Bebådelsedagsgille, or the birthday celebration for the Virgin Mary. In Swedish this holiday is referred to as Vår fru dagen (our lady's day), which when said quickly sounds like "våfflor dagen" (waffles day). Therefore we had planned to have waffles for Sunday breakfast. However, there had been some loaves of French Bread served at the feast, which had been cut into chunks for easy serving, and there was a good bit left over. Therefore I turned them into French Toast instead, and we enjoyed that breakfast every bit as much as we would have enjoyed waffles.

Everyone loved the site, even though we couldn't sleep there, and we are talking about the possibility of using it again, and wondering if it might be possible to talk them into letting us take it for a full weekend, and even sleep there. We are even discussing the possibility of doing a Norrskensbard contest there--the main hall has excellent acoustics, and the standard default set up of the room permits 60 people seated for a banquette, with space for dancing, and there are two other decent sized rooms with tables.  The kitchen is a little small, but if we did a potluck feast in several courses, and people bring food for only one course, then fewer people would need to be in the kitchen at once...

Photos from the day are over on FB