The Community Table · Presented by The Churchville Inn

Byers’ Choice: How a Bucks County Dining Room Table Became a Christmas Tradition

It began with one woman who wanted Christmas to feel warmer than tinsel and blue lights, and nearly fifty years later it is still made by hand a few towns over in Chalfont.

Byers’ Choice Carolers, handcrafted in Chalfont, Pennsylvania

In the late 1960s, Joyce Byers, an amateur artist with a degree in fashion design, went looking for Christmas decorations and found mostly aluminum tinsel trees under harsh blue lights, nothing that resembled the holidays she remembered. So she made her own. The first Carolers stood on the family’s dining room table that year, the relatives admired them, and the following Christmas, on a tight budget, Joyce knew exactly what she would be giving as gifts. A neighbor suggested bringing a few to a local shop, where they sold quickly, and before long a couple of dozen stores across the country were asking her for more.

What followed is the kind of family story this county knows well. Joyce enlisted her husband, Bob, and their two sons, and every autumn the Carolers took over the dining room until the whole house was upended. When a downturn slowed Bob’s construction business, he saw what the figures could become, and in 1978 the couple hired their first employee and turned the garage into a workshop. Both sons joined after college, and today the family oversees a team of around forty artisans in Pennsylvania who still sculpt, paint, and dress every Caroler by hand, figures that now find their way into thousands of gift shops around the world.

Artisans at work on the Byers’ Choice production floor

A visit to the
Byers’ Choice Visitor Center
is less a shopping trip than an unhurried afternoon. Early in the week you can watch the artisans at work from above the production floor, then settle into a small Victorian theater for a short film on the family’s history before walking a cobblestone street out of Dickens’ London, its shop and cottage windows filled with Christmas scenes. There is a collection of more than two hundred nativities gathered from around the world, anchored by an eighteenth-century Italian presepio on view all year, and in the warmer months the formal gardens around the gift shop fill with roses and sculpture. This time of year the shelves lean toward autumn, witches and a Headless Horseman keeping company with the first of the Christmas carolers, and by November the doors open seven days a week.

There is something familiar to us in all of this. The Inn has spent forty-plus years in the same corner of Bucks County, and we have watched more than a few family traditions start at a table, grow a little beyond it, and become the thing people plan their season around. If you make the drive to Chalfont this fall, or once the holidays arrive, come back our way for dinner afterward, and if your own family’s gathering has outgrown the dining room, we have rooms upstairs and down that were made for exactly that.

Part of The Community Table series · The Churchville Inn