The Museum of Northern Arizona’s annual Community Holiday Party is a time to gather and mingle, to enjoy the simple pleasures of the holidays, to make homemade crafts together with friends, and to provide for those who are less fortunate. On Saturday, December 3 from 10 a.m. to noon, holiday celebrants of all ages will be treated to free admission, seasonal entertainment, and refreshments of hot cider, hot cocoa, and cookies.
New this year, the Museum is asking visitors to bring in date canned foods to be donated to the Care
and Share Food Bank in Flagstaff which needs to stockpile food for the holidays. Suggested canned foods most wanted by the food bank include holiday items like canned veggies, yams, cranberry sauces, and pumpkin pie mix. Canned meats like beef stew and tuna are needed in addition to peanut butter.
Federated Community Church’s Joyful Ringers will ring their bells at 10 a.m. to celebrate the season.
At 11 a.m. the Flagstaff Arts and Leadership Academy Choir will perform selected song from their repertoire.
Authors and chefs Jen Castle and Blake Spalding return again this year with food samples from their popular Hell’s Backbone Grill in Boulder, Utah in the heart of the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument. They will also sign copies of their cookbook With a Measure of Grace, the Story and Recipes of a Small Town Restaurant that offers 68 recipes of their Western Range, Pueblo Indian, and Southwestern blend of cooking.
This year’s regionally-inspired crafts to decorate the MNA tree and to take home include pine cone ornaments, customized wrapping paper, snowman and reindeer gift bags, a community paper quilt project, and handmade greeting cards.
The Museum’s current exhibits include Passionate Vision, Landscape Paintings by Joella Jean Mahoney. Her large scale landscapes in oil are inspired by the vivid colors and dramatic shapes of the region. Mahoney’s subject matter fuses the geological, the emotional, and the spiritual.
Also currently at MNA is Stories on Stone, an exhibit created by local rock art experts to explore the meaning of rock art and how it was used by ancient people for telling time and seasons through archaeoastronomy, for documenting stories and legends, for ceremonies, for telling about hunting techniques and other lifeways, and as secret signposts and marking regional boundaries.
Northern Arizona’s premier museum seeks to inspire a sense of love and responsibility for the beauty and diversity of the Colorado Plateau. Native cultures, tribal lifeways, natural sciences, and fine arts from the region are represented in the seven exhibit galleries. The Museum is located three miles north of historic downtown Flagstaff, on scenic Highway 180. It is open daily from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. and more information is available at 928/774-5213 and on the web at www.musnaz.org.