From disaster comes decor | Craft Alive vendor creates Christmas decorations with mango seeds

By Esther Durand, BVI News Staff

Meet 73-year-old Joan Wilson; a Greenland resident who has been creating authentic Christmas decor from recycled mango seeds.

Wilson, the owner of Creative Crafts & Things at Craft Alive in Road Town, told BVI News that her creation has been a hit among the visitors to the territory.

“The tourists — not the locals — they gravitate to it a lot. It makes me feel good to know that I came up with something authentic, original that I have never seen anybody done before,” she said.

How it started

Wilson’s fruit-based craft was actually borne out of great adversity. She told BVI News it started roughly two years ago.

“It was 2017 just before the storm where it had all these fruits and dried them the mango seeds appealed to me to look too good to throw away. So I came to the idea to wash them, clean them, bleach them and I said ‘this is recycling, and this is new’,” the senior citizen said.

“When it was September and the storm came and there was no electricity and nothing to make decorations which I normally make every year, the only thing I had were these prepared mango seeds. So that was the decoration I had for 2017 Christmas after the storm, and I am still doing the mango seed Christmas decoration.”

“We had a lot of people coming to the territory [after the hurricanes] for relief and so on and they come around looking for souvenirs. It was the mango seed that they bought to take back as gifts. Something originally from here, something locally recycled.”

Wilson, national of St Vincent and the Grenadines, has been living in the BVI for over 30 years.

This year’s Christmas Eve marked 18 years since her shop has been at the Craft Alive location.