Wintry Winterfest in Wiscasset

Sun, 02/12/2017 - 7:45am

Saturday was Alice Giles’ first Wiscasset Winterfest. It was also the first for the 7-month-old Wiscasset girl’s parents, William and Holly Giles.

The family was bundled, standing near a cocoa station Wiscasset Middle High School students were running outside Wiscasset Community Center.

Temperatures were in the teens early in the afternoon-evening event. A morning snow had abated after leaving a fresh coat on the snow a storm brought two days before Winterfest.

“It’s perfect,” Holly Giles said about Saturday’s weather. It didn’t look like it stopped people from showing up, her husband said.

It didn’t stop Glenn Powers and son Nestor. They even went sliding nearby on their way to Winterfest. At Wiscasset Park and Recreation’s seventh annual event, they took in Chewonki Foundation’s owl presentation inside WCC’s senior center. Nestor Powers, 9, a fifth grader at the Center for Teaching and Learning in Edgecomb, said afterward, the live owls and information about animals’ camouflage were interesting.

His father, who teaches at CTL, called Chewonki’s presentation awesome. He liked hearing the recorded sounds of owls.

Natalie Dunbar, 7, of Wiscasset especially liked seeing the smallest live owl shown, the saw whet. Dunbar attended Winterfest with grandmother Sherri Dunbar, also of Wiscasset.

Outside the community center, WMHS seniors Stephanie Jones and Keara Hunter were serving cups of cocoa at the cocoa station, under a canopy. There was a lot of snow, so it was fun being there helping with the event, Jones said.

A Parks and Recreation Facebook post Saturday night thanked the day’s attendees and volunteers and event sponsor First National Bank.

Department director Todd Souza on Sunday said Winterfest’s spaghetti supper raised $750. Half will go to the center’s scholarship fund, he said; the other half, to help with expenses linked to Wiscasset resident Nathan Panarese’s recovery from leukemia.