Falconer Mayor James Jaroszynski, the town council and town officials ceremoniously cut a red ribbon Monday to celebrate the official opening of the village’s small Santa Claus-inspired library. Photos by Steve Garvey
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Falconer Mayor James Jaroszynski, the town council and town officials ceremoniously cut a red ribbon Monday to celebrate the official opening of the village’s small Santa Claus-inspired library. Photos by Steve Garvey
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Martha Zenns, Gil Lindahl, Ro Woodard and Laurie Becker flank the new, modernized little library box, which is modeled after the adjacent Christmas house.
FALCONER – The village of Falconer has received a small library box to match its existing Santa Claus house – and the resemblance is uncanny.
During an impromptu grand opening ceremony, the village mayor, board of trustees and others cut the ceremonial red ribbon to signal that the box is now open for business.
The Falconer Public Library donated books to start the new small book exchange at the library.
“We were happy to get the project started through book donations,” says Laurie Becker, director of the Falconer Public Library.
“The new library box replaced an older one that was built in the early 2000s as part of a local resident’s Eagle Scout project,” said Falconer Mayor James Jaroszynski. “It was modeled after the Sant House located nearby.”
Martha Zenns, Gil Lindahl, Ro Woodard and Laurie Becker flank the new, modernized little library box, which is modeled after the adjacent Christmas house.
Jaroszynski discussed how the library box remodel was originally intended to be a project for students in the Falconer Central School District, but Martha Zenns and Gil Lindahl took over the project and the facility was constructed entirely by the Falconer Building Department.
According to littlefreelibrary.org, a Little Free Library is also known as a public bookshelf, book exchange, street library, or sidewalk library. However, the premise of the book containers is always the same. The Little Free Library’s book containers are open seven days a week, 24 hours a day, and are freely accessible to all, eliminating barriers to book access. In addition, the Little Free Library program has become a global phenomenon, with representation in 21 countries, 400 million books shared, and a total of more than 175,000 Little Libraries built – since the program’s inception in 2009, when Todd Bol of Hudson, Wisconsin, mounted a wooden container designed to look like a one-room schoolhouse on a post in his front yard and filled it with books – as a tribute to his late mother, a book lover and teacher who had then recently passed away.
