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Craft Market and Moravian Lights Brighten Hope

December 19, 2025

Women behind a table stacked with baked goods and sweets — Katheryn Bryne, Jennifer Doyle, and Joann Zeliff offer sweet treats from Scrumptious Delights at the Hope Christmas Craft Market. Photo by Joe Phalon.

The folks in the Moravian village of Hope completed two weekends of holiday celebrations with the Annual Moravian Christmas Lantern Walking Tour this past weekend and the Hope Christmas Craft Market, the previous week, which is marking its 48th year.

“This is a town-wide event, and we have over 200 vendors,” said Patty Whitmore, the organizer of the craft market. “We have several different buildings. We have our church, our community center, our elementary school, and our Tom Planer Building. There’s a huge variety of vendors.”

Moravian Christmas Lantern tours featured more than 1,500 luminaries throughout the whole village. This year the event included a tour of the indoor section of the Long House building, just past the center of town, one of two historic buildings on Bridgeville Road that are currently undergoing renovation.

A Moravian candlelight service was held Saturday at St. John’s Methodist Church, and the Festival of Trees was open at the Community Center.

At the craft market, visitors found an eclectic array of handcrafted items by artisans with talents ranging from homemade jams to wooden signs and alpaca woven apparel.

The market has grown over the years to stretch across six buildings in Hope: Hope Elementary School, Inn at Millrace Pond, the Hope Community Center, the Episcopal Church of St. Luke and St. Mary, the St John’s Methodist Church and the Hope Fire Department.

Plans are already underway for the 49th Hope Christmas Craft Market in 2026, said Whitmore.

“We just hope that everybody gets a lot of enjoyment out of our little Moravian town,” Whitmore said. “It’s a very close-knit community, everybody participating. It’s a huge community event that we all work together to put on.”

Joe Phalon, Contributing Writer

Contributing Writer

Joe brings decades of journalism experience to the Ridge View Echo, covering everything from local school boards to the U.S. Supreme Court. A former National Law Journal editor and Columbia Law School press officer, he now enjoys telling community stories in Blairstown, where he lives with his wife, Rose, and their two dachshunds.