Traffic at the windmill has finally slowed down with Christmas approaching and the holiday shopping season coming to a close. While we don’t have the final numbers just yet, December proved to be an outstanding month to cap off what will undoubtedly be a historic year for us. Sales skyrocketed to heights not seen in over 10 years, and if we don’t hit 70,000 visitors before the end of the year we will certainly be close. We want to thank everyone for following along and hope you are as excited about the year we had and what that might mean for next year.

Our annual appeal for donations went out two weeks ago. We’re so very thankful for those who have already given this year and hope to continue raising funds into the next year to help with covering next year’s substantial operating expenses. As the letter we sent out acknowledged, our operation is by no means profitable. And while sales revenue from the gift shop are very exciting, we are still well below our ability to cover all of the expenses of operating the windmill and everything that comes with it. This year we spent $20,000 just on the interstate billboards encouraging travelers to come to Elk Horn. These expenses, while less exciting than capital projects, account for the most critical needs of our organization to function, and we hope that people may continue to give in support of our cause.

The publication of our annual appeal carried with it another problem that we hope to have resolved soon. At some point in the last 6 weeks or so, the function of our website to accept electronic donations has broken down. Unfortunately, at the risk of disrupting site traffic and end-of-year webstore sales for the gift shop, this situation could not be resolved before the end of the year. We hope to have it addressed after January 1.

On a more positive note, though, the resolution we did come up with was to debut our new membership site slightly ahead of schedule. While it is still technically under construction, we encourage everyone to have a look over at danishwindmill.wildapricot.org (to be danishwindmill.org soon). This website is part of the membership/donor management software we invested in at the beginning of the year as part of grant funding received from the Pomeroy Foundation. It is intended as a membership-specific website for members of our organization (which everyone reading this paper should already be!). On this website, you can manage your membership, make secure donations, download our quarterly newsletter, learn about volunteering opportunities, and much more. We’re already in the process of uploading files from our digital collection including the Vestergaard account book which was completely scanned in high resolution images last year. Going forward, you will even see the articles we publish in this paper including this one! So go ahead and check out danishwindmill.wildapricot.org. We’re very excited to finally have this new website out in the open. And danishwindmill.com isn’t going anywhere… for now.

From the Danish Windmill to all of you, we wish all of our supporters far and wide a very Merry Christmas and Happy New Year. We’ll be busy conducting inventory through the rest of the year. If you want to help us out, just come in and buy something!