City of Casey issued the following announcement on Oct. 23.
There’s been a lot of speculation, questions, and confusion about this year’s event. First off, Candy Canes on Main 2020 IS happening!
Unfortunately, due to COVID-19, we’ve had to downsize the event substantially, part of that including our Merry Market. This was not an easy decision whatsoever. We love our market and our vendors, some of which have been with us for several year. They are small business owners and this year has been hard on them too. We get that and don’t take it lightly. They have always added greatly to our event, and they will be missed this year. It has been called into question why they brick-and-mortar businesses will be open, but the market is cancelled.
The stores have the choice how to handle the traffic and social distancing standards in their own stores. The market is directly affiliated with CCoM and therefore causes extra insurance hoops to jump through and liability risks. CCoM is funded from a very low budget, especially this year, which created lots of additional issues to work out. Unfortunately, there wasn’t a great solution on how to safely have the market and we had very little commitment from vendors willing to participate this year due to the risk and we weren’t willing to sacrifice the reputation we’ve worked so hard to build due to low attendance. It just wasn’t feasible. HOWEVER, we are allowing vendors to set up in or outside stores with the approval of the business owners, so they can still be part of the event, they just aren’t directly affiliated with CCoM or the Merry Market this year.
We are very lucky we’re able to have the event at all with everything that’s been taken away this year. At one point it was a serious question as to whether we could have the event as a whole or not. We could have taken the easy route and cancelled it, but we did not want to do that. We love CCoM and know our community does too, and we wanted to create some piece of normalcy in a not-so-normal year. Plus we feel a strong obligation to our local, downtown businesses.
CCoM was created for the small business brick and mortars by their small business owners to bring people downtown to shop for the holidays. Simply put, there is no CCoM without these businesses. This is for them and we owe it to them to try and make this event be the best we can make it, whatever that may be, even in these strange times.
Original source can be found here.
Source: City of Casey
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