A unit of five elite elves entered the William Hobbayne Centre at 1 pm on Sunday to transform the community space into an indoor Christmas market venue for artisans from Hanwell and Ealing. The first stage of operations was all about unpacking goodies from cars, moving chairs and generally relocating various items: from mulled wine bottles to beer bottles. And let's not forget about the hot chocolate! The upcoming festive crafts fair was going to be properly merry!

The team was blocked from setting up the tables for the stall holders until 2 pm because of a taekwondo class in the main hall. Instead, they helped with the set-up in the backroom, where one of our GoodGymers, Milly, today visited the Hobbayne Centre as one of the local craftspeople. Lena has shown unwavering patience, untangling a cable of Christmas lights and then braving the weather to embellish a rail outside the centre despite gusts of wind and rain. Her festive decoration must have grabbed the public's attention as later the event had a good, steady stream of visitors.

Five minutes to 2 pm the event organiser, Siena, gathered the crew and briefed them about the plan of action. The elves were to take over the taekwondo training space, move the chairs out, bring the tables in and unfold them as soon as possible so that the local crafters could start preparing their stalls.

With the main hall maneuvres completed quickly, the elves moved to the kitchen and started getting tipsy (I mean busy!) preparing the beverages. Steph Ducat and Paul heated the mulled wine and did careful quality checks that revealed that the drink was warming and excellent in taste. Nishy and Lena took on a more advanced task of preparing hot chocolate in a Heinz-branded soup warmer. The team trusted Nishy's (who is a talented baker) skills to figure out the proportions of milk and chocolate powder. The process required a lot of stirring, which Lena, again, did with compelling persistence. Kash came in at the end to give the concoction a more energetic stir. The chocolate drink turned out smooth and tasty, but it had nothing to do with "hot". June, the task owner, suggested heating it up in a saucepan and then pouring the batch back into the soup warmer to keep it at the right temperature. The trick worked like magic and concluded the preparations, shortly before the arrival of the firsts visitors. Check out what happened next!