Festivals
Growing Together
The student experience at Camellia Waldorf School includes a diverse range of curricula, extracurricular activities and opportunities to bond as a community. We offer many options for our students to choose from, making them directly involved in designing their own educational path. Get in touch to learn more about what it’s like to attend Camellia Waldorf School.
Michaelmas
Michaelmas is a festival of courage that marks the passage into the darker half of the year and is celebrated at Camellia on the last Friday of September. Parents, families, and friends are invited to attend. The event includes processions, banners, class presentations, costumes, and enormous puppets in a pageant that artistically portrays the human inner struggle between dark and light. After the pageant, the community enjoys enjoys a picnic lunch, beautiful cakes baked by parents, and games.
Michaelmas is a faculty-led event. Parents provide support by baking cakes, organizing the cake procession, cutting and serving cake, cleaning up, and helping the faculty with games and in other areas as needed.
Protected Path
Protected Path is an annual event at Camellia, usually held on the weekend before Halloween. Camellia children from our early childhood program through third grade are invited to walk path lit by luminaria that winds around the campus. Along the way, the children meet friendly characters such as fairies, mermaids, magicians, or cowboys in costume who welcome and entertain. Designed for young children by the parents at Camellia, Protected Path cultivates a sense of wonder with none of the scary elements often associated with Halloween.
Protected Path is a parent-led event. There are many ways to be involved, including planning, set-up, clean-up, creating and/or performing a skit, and contributing baked goodies for the dessert buffet at the end of the Path.
*This event has not resumed since returning from COVID.
Winter Faire
The Winter Faire is a popular annual event where we open our doors to the public for a day of holiday crafts, foods, shopping, and entertainment. The Winter Faire’s highlight is crafting opportunities for children and their parents with materials and instruction provided. Entertainment includes storytelling, puppet shows, a gallery of student work, and music. Vendors offer a wide variety of unique, quality gifts including handmade toys and dolls. The “Children’s Store” is stocked with treasures designed for the young shopper and to fit a child’s budget. Homemade baked goods and warm beverages are available.
Winter Faire is a parent-led event that benefits from “all hands on deck” school-wide participation. Opportunities to help include all aspects of planning and organizing, as well as a variety of fun ways to volunteer on the day before and the day of the Faire.
Opening Day Assembly
On the first day of school in September, the children in our elementary and middle school (first through eighth grade) gather in our outdoor space for an Opening Day Assembly. Faculty and staff are introduced, and new families are welcomed. The eighth grade students assemble and are introduced as student leaders in the school. The first grade class is then called forward, and each child receives a rose as a welcoming gift from an eighth grader. Students then go to their classrooms as the learning begins.
Camelliapalooza
An evening of laughter, great food, and exciting silent and live auctions, is a dinner event held every spring. This is our school’s biggest fundraising event of the year, where auction items include vacations, weekend getaways, private wine tours and tastings, event tickets, and much more. The primary purpose of this event is fundraising, and the money raised plays a large role in our annual budget. Camelliapalooza is great for community-building and a lot of fun!
Camelliapalooza is a parent-led event, and it that truly needs “all hands on deck” in order to be successful. Parents can participate in a number of ways, including all aspects of organizing and planning, making and/or soliciting personal, family, and business donations of goods or services to the auction and contributing to a class gift for the auction. See latest events.
May Day
Camellia’s May Day Festival is an outdoor celebration of spring that also honors the parents of the graduating eighth-grade class. Parents, grandparents, and friends gather ’round as the May Queen enters, and classes sing, dance, and play musical instruments. Students in first through seventh grade offer a gift to the May Queen in the form of a song or music and the eighth-grade students perform traditional dances around the maypole. Later, there is strawberry shortcake, and classrooms are open with student work on display.
The May Day Festival and Open House is a faculty-led event, supported by parents who provide and sell delicious strawberry shortcakes.
