Better homes and frostings — holiday fare preview

Published 8:00 am Wednesday, December 4, 2002

Santa Claus would feel at home.

The big red barn at Hazel Creek Montessori, hung with festive baskets of poinsettia and featuring elf-sized Adirondack chairs in red and green, looks like a perfect North Pole workshop. The illusion is supported by the buzz of activity within, as industrious tykes in elf garb frost gingerbread houses.

The work is in preparation for this weekend’s Christmas in the Country tour; the island preschool will be among the hosts for the ninth annual holiday event, with seven other venues including historic homes, farms and artists’ studio.

For Hazel Creek, the week-end-long sale of craft items and baked goods will be a fund-raiser to purchase playground equipment.

For the islanders who visit, the event is a chance to buy from a wide array of craftspersons with wares in the barn – and to see a unique school campus.

“We think we’re one of the island’s best-kept secrets,” school owner Janice Pederson said. “We translate Montessori teaching to the outdoors. I think we are the only school in the country like this.”

Founded by Pederson and her husband Ollie Pederson in 1990, Hazel Creek is situated on 20 acres next to Meigs Farm and the Grand Forest. The property is bisected by the creek for which the school was named.

Unlike most local private schools, which are operated as non-profit organizations, the school was established as Hazel Creek Corporation, a for-profit business owned by the Pedersons.

“Because we own everything, it didn’t make sense to be non-profit,” Janice Pederson said.

The school is certified through the National Center for Montessori Education in California.

Hazel Creek’s four classrooms can accommodate 74 students. The programs, including daycare, preschool and before-and-after-school care for children up to age 12, have 85 children enrolled, although many are part-time.

From the start, Pederson says, she intended to merge “hands-on” teaching methods developed by Maria Montessori with outdoor learning.

“We wanted to develop a rural flavor,” Pederson said. “I grew up on a ranch in Montana and our four children were raised here.”

The school still integrates outdoors with classroom learning, although the program has expanded to offer daycare and summer camp, and the campus has grown to include an English-style cottage school room; a Western motif schoolhouse; a greenhouse; two barns; offices; an indoor swimming pool; and a covered riding ring.

Students have helped landscape the campus, planting 350 baskets of flowers and propagating greenhouse plants.

Students who arrive at Hazel Creek before the start of the school day help groom and feed horses, and clean the stalls.

“Those kids are the ‘barn rats,’” Pederson says. “That’s their nickname.”

Landscape architect Ollie Pederson put up several of the buildings himself – including details like the nearly-to-scale mill house inside the barn, complete with a mill wheel turned by cascading water lit by a blue spot.

Hazel Creek Corporation also owns 20 horses, five of which are used for lessons.

The horse program is at the heart of the hands-on teaching, Pederson says.

“It takes a very dependent child and gives them their independence on a horse,” she said. “They develop gross motor skills, fine motor skills – everything that goes into riding a big animal.”

Four-year-old student Caitie Mooney says she can’t wait to show off her school to Christmas in the Country visitors next weekend.

“I like it here,” she said. “It’s fun.”

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The 9th annual Christmas in the Country tour opens with a “Merry Memories” gala, 4-9 p.m. Dec. 5, at Lynwood Center and the new Lynwood Commons. Festivities include a visit by Santa; face-painting and refreshments; an auction and raffle to underwrite clowning at Vietnamese orphanages; songs by Renaissance Jazz; and a special showing of the 1946 classic, “The Beauty and the Beast” at 7:30 p.m.

The Dec. 6-8 tour takes visitors into historic homes, studios, barns and stables for a Santa’s sack gone eclectic, with ranch relics, metal sculpture, woolen attire, scone mixes and herbal vinegar among the fare for sale. Sites include Art Soup Gallery in Winslow; Blakely House, Rose of Sharon’s and Countrymen Stables in the south end; Fortner Books and Hazel Creek Montessori School, central; and the Christmas House and Willow Brook Farm in the north end of the island.

Merry Memories information: 842-0500 or 780-1737. Details of all events can be found at www.christmasinthecountry.info and in the Hollydays Guide, available at each stop and at the Bainbridge Island Chamber of Commerce.