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FAIRMONT - This Marion County city with proud Italian roots has been hooked on its Feast of the Seven Fishes Festival for two decades now.
Main Street Fairmont is the proud host of the gathering, and if you own a business downtown or locally within city limits, the organization wants you to second that emotion - with the help of some plywood inspiration from the Marion County Technical Center.
Tech center students will cut out 12 fishes in the aforementioned material, which merchants may decorate as they wish in honor of the gathering, which will happily take over Monroe this Dec. 11-12.
Be it fun and whimsical or sentimental and reverent, organizers want to see your handiwork during this, the 20th gathering.
Visit www.mainstreetfairmont.org for all the particulars.
Sentimentality and a solid sense of humor for the holiday season are what got Robert Tinnell into all this in the first place.
Tinnell, who hails from the Fairmont area in north-central West Virginia, lived several years in Los Angeles after film school, where he directed MTV videos and won awards for his work in advertising.
He came up with the "Feast of the Seven Fishes" graphic novel (think comic book with a hardcover) after he and his wife moved back to raise their two children here.
It's the tale of a boisterous fictionalized Italian American family - based on his own and others he knew - as it filled the kitchen, the living room and the pews of the local Roman Catholic parish in preparation of the aforementioned Feast in 1983.
For the uninitiated, the Feast of the Seven Fishes is exactly what it says it is: a bountiful Yuletide repast, complete with its requisite, seven varieties of seafood.
Tinnell's Italian immigrant grandmother was legend in the Greentown coal camp near Rivesville for the Feast that would emerge, like culinary magic, from her tiny kitchen every Dec. 24.
Isabella's grandson wrote the novel in installments online 22 years ago, with a selection of her Feast recipes serving as the afterword.
Said book begat a well-received romantic comedy in 2019 that has since become required holiday viewing for lots of households here and there - Italian, or no.
All these seasons later, Tinnell remains surprised and pleased with the success of the book and movie.
There is a Merry Christmas (or Buon Natale) caveat, however.
"For me, it's the festival in Fairmont that really is the most gratifying," he said.
"Because it's home."