Practical PR
A Tradition Born from Challenge:
How Winter Wonderfest Became a Community Celebration
By Eric Steckling
The holiday season of 2020 was unlike any other. Across Illinois, familiar traditions had been interrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic. In Barrington CUSD 220, students were learning remotely, performances had moved online or been canceled, and opportunities for the community to gather were limited.
Amid that uncertainty, Brigid Tileston, Barrington 220’s Director of Fine, Visual, and Performing Arts, began thinking about what was still possible.
“With everything we were navigating during COVID, we had to think differently about how we could showcase our students’ talents and safely bring people together,” Tileston said. “We couldn’t recreate our traditional holiday events, so we started asking: What could we create instead?”
That question sparked Winter Wonderfest.
What began as a Fine Arts idea quickly grew into a districtwide effort. For three nights in December 2020, the Barrington High School campus was transformed into a drive-through winter festival.
Families traveled through a route filled with lights and decorations while students performed outdoors. Choir, orchestra, band, and dance students entertained visitors from multiple stages. Technical theater students designed lighting, a student-produced holiday video became a drive-up movie, and schools from across the district decorated trees along the route.
Even district principals participated: As life-sized cardboard cutouts.
For students who had spent months performing without traditional audiences, the experience was particularly meaningful.
A New Tradition
Winter Wonderfest could easily have ended when pandemic restrictions eased. Instead, the community wanted it back.
That response showed district leaders that the event had become more than a temporary substitute for traditional performances.
“We started Winter Wonderfest because we were trying to solve a problem,” Tileston said. “But we quickly realized we had created something people genuinely felt connected to.”
Over the next several years, Winter Wonderfest evolved from a drive-through experience into an open-house-style celebration inside Barrington High School. The event expanded to include student art displays, children’s crafts, carnival games, DJs, dance and musical performances, live ice carving, book readings, and other activities.
In 2023, the fourth annual Winter Wonderfest also helped introduce the community to Barrington High School’s new front atrium, constructed as part of the district’s community-supported facilities improvements. Instead of simply unveiling the space, the district filled it with students, families, music, and activity. Each school and many departments across the district were responsible for decorating part of the entrance, truly capturing the “all hands on deck” effort.
By the fifth annual event in December 2024, Winter Wonderfest looked dramatically different from the event created four years earlier. Its purpose, however, remained the same: bring students together, showcase their talents, open the district’s doors, and create joy.
The most recent edition in 2025 featured over 650 performers and the work of 200+ artists!
More Than a Holiday Event
For Superintendent Craig Winkelman, Ed.D., Winter Wonderfest illustrates an important role public schools play beyond academics.
“Our schools are the cornerstone of our community,” Winkelman said. “Winter Wonderfest gives people a chance to walk through our doors, interact with our students, and experience the creativity and energy that exist here every day. That connection builds pride, relationships, and a stronger sense of community.”
The event also provides students with something particularly valuable: an authentic audience.
“The arts are about connection,” Tileston said. “When students see families stop to listen to their music, look at their artwork, or applaud their performance, they understand that what they create has value beyond the classroom.”
As Barrington 220 prepares for its sixth Winter Wonderfest, one of the district’s most anticipated traditions remains rooted in the same idea that inspired it during an extraordinarily difficult winter six years ago: schools have the power to bring people together.
What started as a creative response to isolation has become a celebration of students, schools, and community.
Sometimes the traditions that mean the most aren’t the ones we inherit.
They’re the ones we create together.
Eric Steckling is Director of Communications for Barrington CUSD 220.