2013, marks the 50 year anniversary
as a wood carver for Christine Coffman

This year, 2013, marks the 50 year anniversary as a wood carver for Christine Coffman.  Her first project to commemorate her golden carving anniversary has been to create a grouping of 50 hand carved bears.  The bears express a variety of emotions.  There are shy bears, happy bears, really happy bears, glad to see you bears, humble bears, apologetic bears and bears that are just standing there ready to have some emotion attached to them.   Each of these bears, when given as a gift, gives the gift of, if not laughter, then at least a smile or a grin. 

Click here to see all 50 anniversary celebration bear carvings.

Each of Coffman’s bears is individually cut from Linden wood.  Coffman’s goal is to make each little bear carving an original.  In fact, it would be harder to make the bear carvings all alike, rather than all different.  These group photos, below,have each of the different poses arranged together to make it easier to compare and choose which bear or bears would be most appropriate for the gift-giving.

The carved bears can be used to create a story or family.  Fathers Day could be represented by a bear with outstretched arms telling a story and a few family members standing beside him listening with rapt attention.

A simple family can be created with larger bears for the adults and smaller for the children.

This photo of a group of carved bears has a ruler in it to show the size of the bear carvings.

This photo shows all 50 of the carved bears, separated into groups of similar types.