In short, I am busy: Life-Size Candyland

Getting started -
Grandma Nutt has aged very well lol

The History

  Christmas is a big "thing" in our town and it's not a hill I'm going to die on. I had run a "Santa's Kitchen" program with cookies and crafts and decided it was time for something new, especially since attendance was slowing down. 

  Candyland was a big collaboration. It took the combined efforts of myself, my two teen aides, my two part-time associates, multiple adult volunteers, two tween volunteers, and teen volunteers on the day of the program. I started planning it back in August (and yes, this was really short notice - most planning processes for a program of this scale start at least a year in advance!). I cancelled several large programs we usually do in the fall and a lot of outreach because we was working on this.

  I looked at many, many resources online. Pinterest boards for ideas, other libraries who had done the program, and asked staff for ideas as well. These are some of the best resources I found:

• https://www.pinterest.com/mslola/life-size-candy-land/?lp=true
• http://www.programminglibrarian.org/programs/life-sized-candy-land
• http://lalalalibrary.blogspot.com/2015/03/life-sized-candyland.html

  In 2017 I had teen volunteers, dressed up more or less, at each station. In 2018 I was contacted by a new company, Fairytale Birthday Company, and the characters came from free. I hired them in 2019. 

All of the pictures and the instructions, 2017-2019 and 2023 are included here. 2023 especially has super detailed, step-by-step planning.

First year: 2017

• Our attendance was between 280 and 300. Set-up took 3-4 hours the night before with myself and a second staff member. The program ran from 9am to around 12:30 with the last teams finishing at 1pm. We had approximately 7 teen volunteers running stations. It took about an hour just to shove everything back in the Storyroom, post pictures, and vacuum. We still had to dismantle and put everything away on Monday.
• The main feedback was that I needed to feed more people through the game - they had to wait too long for their turns to play and I needed more spinners.
• The cardboard cut-outs were made by an adult volunteer and we used construction paper for the game board, taping it down with packing tape. I do not recommend this as even if you are in good shape; it's awful on your back and knees.
• We had candy at every station and I spent about $150, plus we got a lot donated. I also had donated toothbrushes!

Second year: 2018

• Our attendance this second year was very close to the first, between 250 and 300. Most of the props were still good from the previous year, although we did need to make a new gingerbread house and touch some things up. 
• I had more staff helping with the set-up on Friday, but it still took about 4 hours. Most of that was laying the path - we taped it in long continuous lines, instead of individually, which helped but not much.
• I had organized the game layout a little differently this year and gotten more spinners, which worked well, but it was still a crush and I lost my voice trying to yell for the teams!

Third year: 2019

• Ironically, this year when I paid for the princesses we had a big drop in attendance, down to about 150. Most people said they had already seen/played it last year, so did something else this year - a live nativity at a church was mentioned frequently. 
• We once again had to build the house from scratch, but everything else was able to be touched up in a week or so and I spent a lot of time organizing the game.
• I alternated the candy with stickers (all the candy was donated).
• The biggest change this year was a wonderful library volunteered SEWED a path for us in sections and started attaching velcro to them. They didn't all get velcro but I got some carpet sticky shrink wrap stuff that went over them nicely. She has promised to finish velcro'ing them and trim them all with pinking shears to cut down on fraying.

After seeing the big drop in attendance in 2019, I tentatively planned to do something different the next year. Well, we all know what that something different was... When we next resumed this program, holding it in January 2023, there were some major changes.

• I changed the program to a self-run, play at your own pace. I didn't think we'd ever have close to 300 people again, so it would work fine for people to walk through on their own without waiting to be called.
• The second big change was that I moved the program to January, holding it on the Saturday and Monday of MLK day, when there's no school.
• This year, anticipating a smaller group, I moved the crafts to the Storyroom and started the game in the teen area. I did keep the Community center available if we needed to move crafts there, but we didn't end up needing to do that.
• We had approximately 200 people on Saturday and around 80 on Monday.