Kump Education Center invites the public for a Kump House Centennial Celebration to enjoy a diverse collection of 100 Christmas trees on Sunday, Dec. 21 and Sunday, Dec. 28 from 1-3 p.m. at 401 Randolph Avenue, across from the Elkins Kroger store.

Children may take turns talking with Santa in the living room before Christmas. Everyone is welcome to enjoy the trees, sample tasty treats, and watch a magical toy train.

Our amazing arboretum includes trees made of candy, ceramics, cloth, foil, glass, metal, paper, plastic and painted wood as well as traditional evergreens and holly trees, both inside and outdoors.

The trees are being brought together, not only to celebrate our centennial, but also to make math more fun. We can create almost endless examples of percentage problems with 100 trees of different types. We may also make word problems using fractions and measurements.

We will have at least one traditional evergreen tree in the room where Santa will visit with our young guests. The other 100 diverse Christmas trees have been discovered at the Kump House and in the homes of friends and family members, as well as at local Elkins charities and stores.

The oldest tree is an antique that family members remember seeing c.1955 on the front hall table. Now it is so fragile that we have moved it upstairs to a chest of drawers in the governor’s bedroom. Its green paper needles have turned yellow now, and they are falling off onto the dresser scarf. Although the electrical wiring was removed long ago, I remember when the glass candles had a fluid that would light up and bubble softly.

Across the second-floor hall on the dresser in Fannie’s quilt room, we have a dark green cloth tree that came from the local Methodist Christmas Market. We found the perfect products to make it a button tree with rickrack popcorn strings from the Elkins Sewing Center. We were given two green ceramic trees that will stand by the button tree, plus five plastic flames from Ceramics with Class to use with a white ceramic tree from the Second Chance Shop.

In our attic we found a wooden lollypop tree packed with its old suckers. We ordered a gumdrop tree from Vermont Country Store that came with a bag of new gumdrops. We will buy three different new candies to go in a glass trilevel candy tree that was empty in our attic. We have an antique cookie jar tree that will serve as a center piece, but we do not expect to put cookies in it. Only fresh food items, including cookie trees, will be available to really eat.

Many foil, metal and plastic Christmas trees come to us in different shapes and sizes from China by way of the local Dollar Store. Christmas trees have changed over the years, but we still see the magic of Christmas when we share with others. We hope our guests will enjoy the trees and support our efforts to secure the future for our local Kump Education Center, where learning can always be fun.