Reader-Submitted Marketing
Tip
Swing Holiday
Festival
Submitted By
Cheryl Finnegan, Educator/Volunteer Coordinator
Goodhue County Historical Society
Red Wing, Minnesota
By getting the whole community involved in a day-long Swing Holiday Festival, the museum broke
its all-time attendance record.
"We had nostalgic music throughout the day -- '40s songs,
swing bands, sing-a-longs and dancing. Special displays and living
history demonstrations throughout the museum highlighted life
in Goodhue County in the 1940s. WWII veterans brought memorabilia
and we had displays on liberty ships, prisoners of war, the homefront
and women in the military. We involved County Extension and 4-H,
and also other organizations -- Land Use Management for displays
on recycling, the Red Cross and the County Public Health Service
for a station called the "Med Unit," and the Coca-Cola
Bottling Company for their war-time history and vintage pictures
of Santa Claus and airplanes.
School children colored 48-star flags to decorate one tree
in our reproduction school room, and there was also a Recycling
Tree that kids helped decorate. They learned to make ornaments
from recycled materials and could stamp leftover newsprint to
use as gift wrap. At the Med Unit, children could also help roll
bandages, make a nurse's hat or a parachute, and bring their
dolls, stuffed animals or action figures in for a 'field checkup.'"
In conjunction with the event, the local daily newspaper,
the Red Wing Republican Eagle, sponsored a 1940s Holiday Memories
Contest and published a special pull-out edition the day of the
festival. To stimulate sales of Historical Society memberships,
the museum offered "ration coupons" redeemable at the
festival's USO-style cafe to anyone purchasing a membership that
day.
"One thing I really liked about the event," Cheryl
says, "was getting people and organizations involved in
the museum and new uses of the museum."
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