Carnoustie at Christmastime

We are a group of local volunteers who have looked after our town's Christmas Lights since 2016. We have also organised an event each year to help celebrate the official switching on of these lights and mark the beginning of the festive season. We always aim to create a fun, inclusive and accessible event for all to enjoy, a chance to showcase the best of our community with local entertainment and produce.

Turns out Lights are not "just for Christmas" when it comes to planning our annual event or maintaining (or dare we dream, extending) our lights display. Bar a couple of months downtime, it's an all year round mission for our small team of volunteers. There's lights to be checked, replacements to be purchasing and restrung by us where possible. There's the planning/ organisation of putting up and taking down the lights, and then there's the event itself which requires insurances, event licensing and council approvals for holding a public event (cue lots of paperwork!). Alongside this we also need to recruit local participants/ business for our entertainment and festive stalls, plan and coordinate the running order (and of course Santa’s grotto) and gather a band of lovely volunteers to help safely manage it all too.

As we said, our goal is to ensure our town and community shine bright during the festive period, and we are so grateful to all who donate/ supply/ support us in any way they can- it really does help us keep the costs down, but unfortunately some costs are unavoidable. Lights do not come cheap and sadly do not withstand our Eastcoast winter weather too well as each year passes. We would love to extend our display to include more of the town, but this would also involve installation of new electrical points too. To give you an example, one new (basic design) light on a lamppost can cost around £300- and that's just the light!

We want to continue to hold an event which is accessible to all, so every year we try to ensure costs are as low as possible for those attending, for example renting children's rides at a cost which enables us to charge no more than £1 per ride and keeping Santas Grotto open to all, whether a donation is able to be made or not. We want everyone to feel welcome and able to enjoy their time.

If you can help us in any way, with even just £1- it really will be so appreciated by not just our group of elves, but by all that enjoy the lights at Christmastime and/or enjoy coming along to take part in our Switch On event.

Thank you for reading this. If you'd like to help us in a more hands on way please do get in touch, and whether you can donate or not, please do share this page as that would be a huge help in itself.