Wight Brainy Bunch Christmas Market

A massive thank you to Hampshire and Isle of Wight Fire and Rescue Service and both crews at Ryde Fire Station for allowing and helping us to transform their station into our Winter Wonderland once again.

To all the local businesses helping us behind the scenes, especially W A Foods Ltd , Island Ales , StageGear Rentals , The Island Tea & Coffee Co. , Sarah and Ben Griffiths, JJ’s Bouncy Castles, Personalize and Coast and Country Marquees .. Thank you for helping us make it happen .

Special thanks to James Westcott and Care at Home Iow for sponsoring this year’s event… To all our wonderful stallholders, most of whom return and support us each year .

Another huge thank you to all our brilliant performers.. Isle of Wight Symphony Orchestra , Medina Marching Band IW, Fusion Arts Academy , Vectis Corps of Drums Marching Band., Marie Smith Music Craft CIC and of course ‘Harry the Hippo’ , who all braved the cold and kept us entertained and feeling festive all day .

We’ve all had to get use to Covid waiting in the wings over the last year, and it certainly threw us a couple of curve balls, making the last week quite a challenging one, with lots of last minute changes and a depleted number of elves … So huge thanks to Ryan Ball, Julie Wright, Sue Hallett, Kelly Pointer, Becks Thompson and Lisa Hendy for working so hard to keep the day running… and of course to each and every one of you for your patience, as you stood in queues for food/drink and especially to see Santa.

Our biggest thank you has to be to Paul Berry, who, at the last moment (09.30am} swapped his big red fire engine for a big red suit and totally stepped in to save Christmas, when our Santa was involved in road traffic accident on his way to us. Thankfully he is ok… but next year…. please travel by sleigh.

Lastly we’d like to thank Indi for spectacularly turning on Ryde Fire Christmas tree lights, with her gorgeous rendition of “We’re Walking in the Air”. It is always such a privilege to invite one of our WBB families to perform this task .

We were completely overwhelmed by how many people chose to spend their day with us, and would like to thank you all so so much for your incredible support … we don’t have a total raised yet as a few bills to pay, but hopefully we can announce this soon.

We wish you all a very Merry Christmas and hope to see you again next year.xx