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Village People
A village tradition
Holy Spirit school held their fete a week ago and this year it was called the Spring Fair, maybe to soften the connotation of that four letter F word . But in the end, putting on a fete is hard work no matter what you call it.
In New Farm, the Holy Spirit School and New Farm State School have a long standing arrangement that their fetes are held on alternate years. I have no idea how this came about but this is a great system. It puts less pressure on local businesses who give an enormous amount of support to both schools while preventing parent and, more importantly, organiser burn out.
I have spoken to lots of parents from schools outside the peninsula and generally I get the same response. Fete’s are hard work and almost always there is the sense that they would rather just pass the hat around or organize an art union, than go to the effort. This has been the fate of many a school fete, so to speak.
In our ever busier lives, we have lost many of our traditions. But the idea of a fete as a festival goes back hundreds and hundreds of years.
Fete comes from the French word Fȇte meaning holiday or party.
The tradition of fete paintings was started in the 1600’s and in 1717 the French academy had introduced a genre of painting named Fete Galante to capture the magic of the…