Ideas for a Successful Christmas Holiday Bazaar

Christmas bazaars serve a few different purposes during the holiday season. This kind of event—which is generally part craft fair, part Christmas festival—gives local artisans a place to sell their wares. Meanwhile, bazaar visitors can buy unique Christmas gifts, enjoy festive food/drink and soak up the holiday spirit surrounded by twinkling lights. And the bazaar might also serve as a fundraiser for a worthy organization.

There are definitely some complicated logistics involved with organizing a holiday bazaar, including securing the space, soliciting vendors to sell their crafts and advertising the event to the community. But even once those plans are in place, bazaar organizers still have a lot to think about.

Namely, how are you going to make the event space feel a like a winter wonderland? How are you going to engage visitors so they want to stick around and shop? With these simple Christmas bazaar ideas, organizing a fun and festive event is within reach.

A holiday bazaar typically takes place in a large space or outdoors. It takes a lot of holiday decor to fill up that kind of space. To make a big impact without spending a lot of money on elaborate Christmas decorations, try asking co-organizers and volunteers to temporarily donate some of their own holiday decor. Here are just a few ideas.

• Set up lit artificial Christmas trees with unbreakable Christmas ornaments all around the space.
• Make centerpieces and other table decor with pine cones spray-painted gold, piled into bowls or big plastic containers and dusted with fake snow.
• Hang garlands everywhere—across vendors' tables, around doorways and strung across walls. The metallic foil type are festive and easy to hang from adhesive hooks.
• Have kids make paper snowflakes with glitter and suspend them overhead throughout the bazaar.

Bringing in food trucks and/or other food vendors is a great way to drum up excitement for your craft bazaar. If it's a fundraiser, try negotiating with them to donate a portion of sales to your organization. This way shoppers can feel satisfied both physically and emotionally as they browse the bazaar knowing that even their food purchases are going to support a cause or organization they care about.

Or, if it's logistically too difficult to bring in outdoor food and drink, set up a table selling a few simple store-bought items like peppermint hot chocolate, hot apple cider and gingerbread cookies.

In addition to having professional crafters sell their work, holiday bazaars also often include stations where visitors can make their own DIY crafts. A volunteer at each station can provide materials and instructions. Tables where visitors can make their own wreaths, their own Christmas cards or their own garlands should work; they're all fun, simple holiday crafts.

Your bazaar might also include a few free game stations, where kids can play simple games like bingo, Ring Rudolph's Nose or Pin the Nose on the Snowman.

Organizing prizes and raffles is a good way to entice people to come to your bazaar in the first place, and can also be useful if you're fundraising.

The easiest way to do this is to sell tickets for a door prize drawing or raffle to be held near the close of the Christmas bazaar. Ask bazaar vendors to donate items for the raffle or ask organization members to donate fun items like golf packages, tickets to local sporting events or gift certificates to encourage participation. Also, create some Christmas gift baskets filled with local delicacies or crafts. Wrap the baskets in cellophane and put them on display so people can see exactly what they might win if they buy raffle tickets.

With these ideas, you're ready to plan a great Christmas craft bazaar! Everything might not go perfectly—but as long as people leave with their arms full of Christmas gifts and vendors are happy, it'll be a success.