One of the first signs that the holidays are upon us is when the two-story Christmas tree made entirely of crab pots begins to illuminate the grounds of the Core Sound Waterfowl Museum and Heritage Center on Harkers Island.
The multicolor glow from the symbol of Christmas — plus all the holiday lights decorating the sizable facility — also means that the Waterfowl Weekend is just around the corner.
Supporter Spotlight
The museum, which highlights the heritage of the 13 unincorporated communities of Down East Carteret County, has held the annual celebration the first weekend of December for the last few decades, and are gearing up for this year’s scheduled for Dec. 5-7.
The weekend gets underway Friday evening with the Core Sound Chow Down stew competition, a ticketed event. The doors open to the public at 8 a.m. Saturday and again at 10 a.m. Sunday. During both days, visitors can meet the more than 45 carvers, artists, photographers and crafters set up at the festival.
While winding down Harkers Island Road on the way to the museum, travelers will pass homes decorated to the hilt, and residents selling crafts on the roadside.
They’ll also drive by Harkers Island School, where the Core Sound Decoy Carvers Guild’s 37th annual Core Sound Decoy Festival is taking place. From 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Saturday and 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Sunday, the campus will be filled with carvers, vendors and antique decoy exhibits. Carving competitions are scheduled throughout both days, and food will be available for purchase.
When the Waterfowl Weekend was in its early days, the focus was mainly on decoys, but the festival has evolved over the years and is now a part of the holiday celebration for many.
Supporter Spotlight
“We have turned what used to be a weekend for decoys to a season of traditions,” Executive Director Karen Willis Amspacher told Coastal Review, and a large part of that is the joy and nostalgia that holiday decorations invoke.
“The museum’s Christmas lights are about Core Sound. Celebrating communities and traditions. That’s what we do every day,” she said.
The two-plus-story Christmas tree made of crab pots and the “Gallery of Trees: Telling our Story” are “part of that celebration for sure,” she explained. The Gallery of Trees features crab pot trees that families, friends and area businesses sponsor and decorate. The first was first held in 2020 and has become a special part of Waterfowl Weekend.
Amspacher said that adding the giant tree made of crab pots to the holiday decor was inspired by social media, with the first try in 2010 or 2011.
“Blame it on Facebook. We kept seeing pics from Maine where they were stacking lobster traps and Maryland where they were stacking crab baskets and we said ‘why not?’” Amspacher said. “The first attempts were a learning experience — small and sometimes more square than round — but then Abbi (Davis) and Kenny (Brennan) took on the project, and their engineering skills and a lot of rebar and zip ties made it happen.”
The small team of volunteers spent the last few days of this October building the 2025 tree, including Davis, a Harkers Island native.
Davis began working part time at Core Sound on and off the summer of 2015 and again while she was attending trade school. Now a volunteer, she helps when she can, which isn’t very often because her career keeps her on the road a fair bit, she said. She currently resides in South Carolina where she’s a lineman.
“The museum is such an incredible place,” Davis told Coastal Review.
Core Sound has captured the sense of place “that most people have a really hard time understanding if they haven’t lived it and gave them a glimpse into the culture of Down East. That is something that would have otherwise been long forgotten by the world.”
Though the tree of crab pots was part of the picture before she began working there, Davis started helping out with the tree in 2015, when the lights were powered by a generator that had to be regularly be fueled up.
“I remember I would ride down there to look at it because it was so beautiful but I also worked at the museum so I took on the job of being the ‘gas lady’ whenever I could that year,” Davis said.
There was a pause on putting the tree up for a few seasons because it became harder to borrow crab pots, compounded by the damage to the facility from 2018’s Hurricane Florence that closed the main building for a few years to undergo repairs.
“In 2020 I started working there again and when I did, we talked about making Christmas big,” Davis continued. “That year I wanted the tree to make a comeback. I remember asking everyone I knew who had crab pots or who had been a crabber in the past, if we could get some for this tree. Everyone I talked to was excited but finding someone that had pots available and the time wasn’t easy.”
The first year that Davis took the project on, her father and sister helped load the crab pots into the back of her pickup truck and in a trailer to haul to the museum. “It took three trips,” Davis said.
Davis explained that the team likes to “joke and say the engineering is a little bit organic because it doesn’t have to be exactly the same to work.” And they’ve been working together for so long, that “at this point we just know what to do.”
Their favorite saying is that “we’re making circles out of squares,” she continued. “We always start with the same amount for the bottom. Make a ring out of pots basically and then fill it in. Each row is done the same way just a smaller number of pots until it gets to the top. The pots are secured through heavy duty wire ties and rebar.”
This year, it took 170 crab pots arranged in 12 rows to build the 23-foot-tall tree.
Once the tree is complete, a glowing handmade star is placed on top.
“The coolest part about this tree for me is what it represents. These pots are actually used by commercial fisherman in the sound. Every year they harvest and haul hard crabs. Knowing that they’re real and not something just bought for decoration,” Davis said.
New this year, the tree is being decorated with buoys hand-painted by local kids, “which is really special,” she said, “And knowing that in every way possible this tree is Down East, makes it absolutely great! It captures the spirit like many things at the museum and it’s put on display so the world can have a chance to see a small glimpse of that.”
“Because everyone loves,” the giant Christmas tree, it is being featured on the museum’s holiday apparel line, Amspacher said. “It has become a symbol of Down East Christmas.”
Waterfowl Weekend details
The fourth annual Core Sound Chow Down and Best Sweet Potato Pie Down East competition starts at 5:30 p.m. Friday. Tickets, $35 for members and $45 for nonmembers, include four cups of your choice from the spread of chowders, soups and stews made by cooks from around the county. Molasses Creek will perform live music.
Competitors returning this year are D’s Island Clam Chowder, Per-Atlantic Crab and Corn Chowder, and Gloucester Mardi Gras Chicken and Sausage Gumbo. New this year will be stewed shrimp, crab-shrimp bisque, stewed scallops, chili, and Cedar Island original lima beans and crab meat. The submissions will be judged by seafood market and chefs from across eastern North Carolina.
Doors open at 8 a.m. Saturday and 10 a.m. Sunday, and each day has special programming.
On Saturday there will be live music at 11 a.m. with Asher Brinson and Friends, noon with Mac McRoy and The South Point Band, and 1 p.m. with Molasses Creek. Preview for the live auction is at 2 p.m. and the auction begins at 3 p.m. The online auction is live now through Dec. 6.
On Sunday, a church service is scheduled for 8 a.m. and at 2 p.m. is a World War II Pearl Harbor Day memorial gathering.
Every year, the museum’s “Core Sound Quilt Crew” sew a quilt that is put up for action to raise funds for the nonprofit museum. This year’s theme is “Reflections of Diamond City.” Tickets can be purchased online for the quilt raffle, as well as the Christmas raffle. Winner takes home $5,000.
