By Jim Bissett
The Dominion Post
FAIRMONT – Mangia, mangia.
And Buon Natale, too.
It’s once again time for the Feast of the Seven Fishes Festival in Fairmont.
The 2025 edition of the gathering that celebrates the Calabrese-Italian roots of this Marion County city and region commences Friday and Saturday on Monroe Street.
This will be Fairmont’s 19th Feast, in fact, and Robert “Bob” Tinnell still can’t get over it.
“It just really took its own trajectory,” said Tinnell, who has a little something to do with it.
Well, actually, he has everything to do with it.
Tinnell is a writer and filmmaker who grew up in north-central West Virginia and notched out a good living in Los Angeles directing music videos at the height of MTV in the 1980s – before moving back East with his family.
These days, he writes and makes movies through his Morgantown-based Allegheny Image Factory, with many of the works set in Marion County and the surrounding region.
He arrived at Deep Creek Lake, Md., to be closer to his widowed mother.
During one of Deep Creek’s signature-long winters, he sketched out “The Feast of the Seven Fishes,” which is story of the (mostly) fictional Oliverio family, as the boisterous Italian clan filled the kitchen and readied for Christmas Eve in 1983, in real-life Greentown.
If you know Rivesville in Marion County, you most assuredly know Greentown.
That’s the name of the coal camp and Rivesville neighborhood where all the families from around the arch of the Boot settled – and it was so-named, because the mining company that owned the place got a good deal on paint one year in that particular hue.
All the company houses were painted green.
Tinnell’s immigrant grandmother, Isabella Oliverio, a spirited, diminutive lady who spoke in broken English, lived in one of them.
Her backyard was right over from Our Lady of the Assumption, the Roman Catholic parish where she faithfully attended Mass. She was known up and down Clayton Street for the traditional Christmas feast (complete with its seven varieties of seafood), which she would prepare every season, just as faithfully.
Isabella’s grandson wrote the online graphic novel in 2004 that turned into the hardcover book with her recipes serving as the afterword.
That project, in turn, begat the 2019 romantic comedy that has since become required viewing for Christmas in a lot of households, here and there.
Be they Italian or not.
“I was astonished with the initial response,” Tinnell said.
He still is – with a happy caveat.
“And as pleased as I am with the success of the book and the movie,” he said, “it’s the festival in Fairmont that really is the most gratifying, because it’s home.”
This year’s feast in Fairmont is at its traditional location on Monroe Street.
It runs from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Friday and Saturday with a host of vendors, an Italian kitchen cooking demonstration, music and more.
“Come out and bring your appetite,” said Alex Petry, the director of Main Street Fairmont and the festival’s host.
Visit Main Street Fairmont’s Facebook page for all the particulars.
“We’ve got 25 vendors along for Feast of the Seven Fishes preparations and another 60 for our Hometown Christmas Market, which will run at the same time,” Petry continued.
“This is our premiere festival. We love it because people come downtown and visit and enjoy all that great food. It really is family.”
Take a plate with you
Which, of course, was Tinnell’s foray into all the Feast-doings, in the first place.
In the early 1990s, while home from Los Angeles for the holidays, he captured his uncles on black-and-white video in Isabella’s kitchen as they jumped in to help their mom prepare the meal.
All his uncles were “characters,” Tinnell said, and he wanted to preserve that.
“I was going for their personalities and their interaction,” he said. “And I didn’t want my grandmother’s recipes to get away. That’s really where the book came from.”
See more from The Dominion Post