Endearing Exchanges
December 2025
Season’s Greetings!
With Christmas merely moments away & the New Year just around the corner, we know this may be a stressful time for you & your loved ones. We hope you are still finding time to rest amid the holiday hustle! Our busiest season at The COVE Art Center is coming to a close, & we are doing our best to put the work aside for a brief moment so we can take the time needed to reflect on where we’ve been this year before jumping into the next project. For us, a part of that means telling our story, & it is our great pleasure to share that story with you here!
The COVE Afterschool
It has been a while since our last update on Afterschool programming, so we are thrilled to bring you this latest look into our time with the students. Be sure to tap the link to our Facebook page for more photos of Christmas with the kids after you’ve read this newsletter!
7 Days of Christmas
There is never a dull moment around Christmastime at The COVE. Our team is very intentional about bringing the spirit of the season into everything we do leading up to our final day before winter break. If you’ve been following our story for long, you might remember some details about past parties we’ve hosted. Usually, we collect gifts from mission partners based on each student’s own Christmas list & give them to the kids at our “Greatest Gift Exchange” Christmas Party…
This year, we tried something new!
Instead of just one party on our last day, we hosted 7 Days of Christmas at Home of the Nomad (our home & artist residence)! The team set up a hot chocolate station along with endless snacks & hot food in our dining room, & the kids got to watch Christmas movies & play games together in our entertainment room. We also had stations for gingerbread house-decorating, Christmas card-making, & a variety of other themed crafts. It wouldn’t be The COVE Afterschool with lesson time, so we gathered each day to talk about the reason for the season with supplemental video content by The Bible Project.
We love having the opportunity to teach our students the meaning of Advent & remind them about the Christmas story each year. To help them understand & retain the message, we always come up with corresponding art projects & crafts they can take home with them. After we touched on Hope, Peace, Love, & Joy, we used one of our days to talk about generosity. There was no project on that day, but instead we had a Christmas shop set up for them to pick out toys, clothes, & other items to give to their family members. Seeing all of our students get excited about giving truly warmed our hearts & may have been the best moment of the week.
Another change we made for Christmas with our kids this year was how we gave them gifts. We decided not to collect gifts from their personal lists & instead gathered a variety of nicer items donated to us throughout the year for our White Elephant game. In the end, each student still walked away with a gift he or she was excited about—including a new guitar!
7 Days of Christmas was a hit, & we are so thankful we chose to use what God had already given us to make it special. We are also grateful for the help of our amazing volunteers! From all of us at The COVE Art Center, we hope you experience the wonder & the joy of Christmas for yourselves as we celebrate the birth of Jesus our savior. Merry Christmas!
Winter Break
The program year always ends with our student Christmas party in early December—or in this case, on the last day of our week-long celebration! The COVE Afterschool will be on break until early February. In the meantime, the NoCo team will be honing our vision, meeting with mentors, seeking sustainability, praying, & preparing for the next season of programming in 2026.
While we are away, please consider joining us in prayer. Pray that our students would continue to study the Bible, pursue a relationship with Jesus, & learn to walk with God daily. Pray that our team would be guided by the Spirit in all our decisions concerning programming, event-planning, administration, & fundraising. Finally, please pray that Directors Brittany & Jordan would find answers & long-term solutions to their health complications, provision for their basic needs, & the wisdom to run this organization effectively to the benefit of everyone we serve & to the glory of God.
The Novelty Collective Music & Arts Festival
Better Every Year
We can’t help but keep saying it to everyone we talk to about the event… We’ve heard the same feedback from several seasoned NoCo artists & frequent attendees… NoCo Fest 2025 was our best festival! There are many reasons why we love this event & look forward to hosting it every November, & the things we love most about it shone very brightly this year.
The Novelty Collective exists to bring people of all different ages, skill levels, beliefs, & backgrounds together through the arts, to celebrate the creativity we each possess, to support one another in our endeavors, & to make meaningful connections with people we might not normally interact with. Our Music & Arts Festival is the spearhead of our mission to cultivate a community that meets that description. NoCo Fest 2025 was such a success because we had the opportunity to host so many returning artists—invested artists—who have benefited from our mission & see the immense value in what we aim to achieve. They effortlessly welcomed all of our new participants into the family, warmly engaged with visitors, & made the experience memorable for everyone. Of course, we could not have done anything well without the tireless work of our event staff. Our team was composed of artists who have been involved with The Novelty Collective for years, & they were more than happy to serve a community they already love dearly.
While it would be difficult to write about all the enchanting encounters we had with artists & patrons, the beautiful interactions they had with each other, & the deep personal feelings many of us could share in the wake of so much care & support, we can give you this beautiful but brief glimpse into the larger story. We invite you to watch this short video from one of our visual artists & hear about her experience with The Novelty Collective:
Teeming With Talent
The atmosphere at The COVE was all we had hoped for: warm, inviting, electrifying, & invigorating. We could not be more pleased with the overall response we received. But good vibes are not the only factor that made NoCo Fest 2025 top the rest.
We received more applications from artists than ever before, & so provided space for as many as we could host, making this year our most packed with talent! There was also a greater diversity of visual art & music represented than we have had in the past, which is one of our primary goals for NoCo Fest. The space & the schedule were about as full as we could make them, but we managed to fit most everything in.
One of our favorite festival traditions is Open Mic. The team decided to lengthen it to an hour this year, & yet that was still not enough time to hear from every band, singer-songwriter, & poet eager to share their gifts with the community. Where we never considered the possibility of expanding the festival to three days, we are talking about it now!
See For Yourself
Finding a single photographer available to shoot The Novelty Collective Music & Arts Festival was challenging this year, all the way up to the month of the event. It quickly became a point of great concern, since we place so much importance on quality photos. We desire to capture as many moments as possible, to share our story & give the artists content they can use to promote themselves in the future.
Somehow, we managed to secure more photographers than ever (five total), & now we have hundreds of amazing photos from our festival! We are incredibly thankful for each of them, & we are ecstatic to share their work with you. Please take a look at the gallery we put together on the NoCo Fest page.
But why stop at our gallery?! If you haven’t had the chance to attend The Novelty Collective Music & Arts Festival, don’t miss the next one. Start planning your November trip to The COVE Art Center now. There isn’t another event quite like it!
At the Close
Now that we are nearing the end of the year, the NoCo team is diving deeper into some necessary clerical work to close the book on 2025 & ready ourselves for all the possibilities of the New Year. This has been a challenging year for us, but we haven’t encountered a problem we couldn’t face by the grace of God & the help of our awesome mission partners. However, things are about to become much more challenging starting on January 1st, as The Novelty Collective is about to lose our largest financial contributor. We will go into further detail in our next newsletter. For those of you who have been tracking our story, we invite you to enter in & help us consider new ways to approach the problem & pathways to long-term solutions.
Thank you for reading, for being a part of the NoCo community, & for walking with us this year. We look forward to witnessing all the ways God is going to bless you & the people we serve through The Novelty Collective in 2026. We are believing for healing, for inspiration, for renewed hope, for greater confidence, for abundant joy, & for all kinds of miracles & marvels to happen when we come together as a community to restore creation to its Creator.
Have a wonderful holiday season, & be blessed!
With much love & affection,
The NoCo Team
Article written by Jordan A. King
