Milltown volunteers create winter scenery

BY SETH MANDEL
Staff Writer

MILLTOWN — Logic suggests that creating a half-mile-long winter wonderland would take more than one month.

But as Joyce Kilmer School teacher Geralyn Gerhart discovered, all you need to do is speak up, as she did when the idea first came to her.

“And then it just became contagious. It was like high energy,” Gerhart said of the overwhelming number of volunteer offers she received. “ ‘I’ll do a candy land,’ ‘I’ll do a gingerbread village,’ ‘I’ll do a skating rink,’ ‘I’ll do a Victorian village.’ It was just magical.”

The response was encouraging, she said, and removed all doubt that the project — a holiday-themed celebration along the Mill Pond Path this weekend — could be completed in time.

“There was no question. It was just like, ‘OK, we’re doing it.’ I cannot tell you how wonderful everybody has been,” she said.

The idea may have been Gerhart’s, but she credits the organizers of the annual Halloween Haunted River Walk for the footsteps in which she has followed.

“It’s frightening when you think of something so big, like how are we going to do this in 4 1/2 weeks? But it was because of Tim McGowan and Randy Farkas from the Haunted River Walk. That’s where I got my confidence from,” Gerhart said.

Most years, the borough participates in a Christmas bazaar. But this year, inspired by the success of the Haunted River Walk, Gerhart wanted to take it in another direction, and to another level.

“We wanted to try something unique and different, especially since our Haunted River Walk was so successful and the people loved it,” she said. “It was almost like the people were yearning for something else. When the Haunted River Walk was over, we missed it.”

The event will benefit the borough’s Our Lady of Lourdes Parish, Gerhart said.

So the fund-raiser had a beneficiary, a theme, and loads of volunteers; it just needed a name.

Gerhart said that many of her students had parents serving in Iraq, and the holiday season can be a painful time for families to be apart. With that in mind, the title of the event became Winter Wonderland: Light the Season with Peace.

The event, which will run Friday, Saturday and Sunday, will begin near the rescue squad headquarters.

One child and one adult will lead tours of between 25 and 30 people through the Wonderland, which will be a half-mile stretch of the Mill Pond Path.

“They stop at the first site where there will be an angel telling them a