BY STEPHANIE BUNKER
Moapa Valley Progress
The Pomegranate Festival will be held this weekend. With the festival comes a sign that the hot summer is over and the beautiful fall weather is welcomed. And with that beautiful weather has come the sweet gems we know as pomegranates. All are invited to celebrate the fall season with pomegranate jellies, honey, and syrup.
The festival will be held on Friday and Saturday, November 1-2 at the Logandale Fairgrounds and admission is free. Besides the many pomegranate products, there will be crafts to purchase, food vendors, a raffle, and entertainment.
New food vendors will be there this year including roasted chicken, Mexican food, BBQ, hamburgers and hotdogs, Italian sandwiches, fruit drinks, and frozen yogurt.
The Moapa Valley Art Guild will be raffling a beautiful quilt with a pomegranate theme. Leah Hurst and Dee Barnum spent countless hours putting the quilt together. Last year the quilt raffle brought a lot of funds to the Art Guild’s scholarship fund and Guild officials are hoping it to be success once again. They will draw a name for the raffle on Saturday near the end of the festival.
Many locals that make crafts or specialty items bring their goods to the festival to be sold. Those who want to sell their handicrafts but couldn’t afford to rent a space may put their items in MV Art Guild consignment craft space. To do so, one must contact the guild by Thursday this week so they can leave a space open.
“People can sell their goods off of a base tuition; it can be cheaper than renting a space and is open to anyone,” said Guild member Annetta Romero.
Friday evening a cheer team will be performing for the crowd. But most of the entertainment will occur throughout the day on Saturday. There will be a variety of entertainment from line dancing to guitar players and singers. At 2:00 p.m. on Saturday there will be a children’s art project in which all youngsters are encouraged to participate.
Usually the festival is held on the same weekend as the Hump N Bump 4×4 event. But this year the Hump n Bump will not be present at the festival. Still, Art Guild members are optimistic on the number of visitors they expect to attend.
“I’m not sure that a lot of the people that have visited in the past had anything to do with the Hump n Bump,” said Guild member Jackie Worthen. “Our main worry is the economy.”
The Pomegranate Festival has been a great fundraiser for the MV Art Guild
“The festival has been great and we have had money to do what we want,” Worthen said.
The money raised in this event is used to fund the Art Guild for the year as well as to give scholarships to graduating high school seniors who plan to pursue art.
