A Morinville family is hoping evergreen dresses and silver snowflakes will help them raise money to stop child abuse.
Cory Cherdarchuk and the rest of his family at First Choice Tree Nursery & Garden Centre just east of Morinville are holding an open house this Friday and Saturday to raise funds for Little Warriors, a group that works to prevent child abuse.
The family, which runs a Christmas-themed store on site, will have several hundred collectable Christmas ornaments on display in their home as well as a field of decorated trees outside. Outside will be a display of six dresses made from live tree branches and pinecones.
They will also be selling a silver "Snowflake of Strength" ornament to raise money for Little Warriors. Half the cost of each ornament, as well as any donations at the door, will be given to the organization.
The Cherdarchuks live, sleep, and dream Christmas, says Cherdarchuk, and have long wanted to find a charity that they could support during the holidays. "Christmas is huge for a child," he says, which makes child abuse education all the more important. "It's very important to see that sparkle and glimmer in a child's eye when they experience the Christmas magic."
One in three girls and one in six boys in Canada will be abused during childhood, says Glori Meldrum, who founded Little Warriors about a year and a half ago, often before the age of 12. "I was abused as a little girl," she says, "and I want to prevent it from happening to other children."
Her group publishes information on how to spot and prevent child abuse.
The funds raised by the Cherdarchuks will go a long way towards keeping her group running, she says. "It's giving back during the holiday season."
Festive dresses
Cherdarchuk, a 23-year-old interior designer, says his parents started collecting porcelain Santas and houses about 20 years ago. They now have about 450 of them. "We have an entire storage room dedicated to Christmas decorations, and it's not a small one."
This is the first year that the family will have a display of Christmas dresses. Cherdarchuk says he got the idea after weaving some live-flower dresses for an art show earlier last summer. "It combines my love of fashion … with the spirit of Christmas."
The dresses went on display on Nov. 21. Each dress took about 50 hours to make, Cherdarchuk says, and was made mostly from branches clipped from trees on the farm. Many of those branches have had to be replaced, he says, as the warm weather has turned them prematurely yellow. The dresses also light up at night.
Each dress highlights a particular theme or material, Cherdarchuk says. Cedar Ball, for example, is meant to capture the beauty of a Disney heroine using cedar boughs. "Think Belle [of Beauty and the Beast] but minus the yellow and add some cedar."
Christmas Dress wraps red bows around a shapely pine bodice to create a dress fit for any druidic box social. "My idea was that someone could wear this to a fancy Christmas party if they were a tree."
One of his personal favourites is dubbed Copper Ruffles — a formal evening gown with a Norway spruce dress and a top made from rippling copper and green magnolia leaves. The two-toned nature of magnolias is particularly appealing, he says.
None of the dresses are wearable, he adds, but that hasn't stopped several ladies from asking. "Some of them would be pretty prickly."
The open house runs from 6 to 9 p.m. Call 780-939-4448 for details.
