With the holiday season rapidly approaching this year, we’ve been busy with all kinds of store events.  In fact, this year we have over 35 different events scheduled  across North America in places like Toronto, Seattle, Beverly Hills, Chicago, New York, Boston, and San Francisco.  Last week one of our skilled origami artists Joe Adia kicked off the events with a holiday-themed origami folding session at the Westfield Mall in New Jersey.  The event was a celebration of the return of a giant 45-foot tall Santa Claus to the mall which you can see below.

This is the enormous 45-foot tall Santa Claus on display at the Westfield Mall in Paramus New Jersey.

The elusive and rarely seen Santa Crane.

For this event, the Taro’s staff was asked to both show off origami as an art-form and also display some holiday-themed models, so Joe brought a collection of models ranging from easy to complex.  He also folded this rather entertaining “santa crane” model that you can see to the left.

The event we widely attended by people of all ages and Joe both folded models for guests and also showed off how certain origami models were created.  We’ve found origami folding to be pretty mesmerizing for younger guests in events like this.  As you can clearly see from the entranced faces below.

Joe Adia is one of the newer staff members for the origami studio and is an accomplished origami designer as well as origami folder and teacher.  In fact the majority of the models show off at the event in the Westfield mall were some of his original designs.  This year is a pretty busy one for us here at Taro’s and we were thrilled to be able to kick off the holiday season with such a bang.