Director of Marketing and Public Relations for St. Bernard, Joyce Nix, has been instrumental in the success of the Bloomin' Festival for the past 31 years.

If you’ve ever attended the St. Bernard Bloomin’ Fest on a glorious spring day, and admired how well organized, neat, clean and orderly everything is, you might think that it just happens that way by chance. It doesn’t. 

Behind the scenes, in a little, out of the way office, every detail of Bloomin’ Fest is mapped out months in advance by Joyce Nix.

Nix, who grew up near the Cullman/Winston County line on a family farm, attended school in Addison. After graduation in 1980, she attended Wallace State Community College, where she attained an associate’s degree in business management.

In 1981, she married Tim Nix. The couple would later have two children, Timothy and Rachel.

She started her first job the very next week, at Parker Bank and Trust, which later merged with AmSouth. After a while she moved to Regions Bank, and in 1983, she accepted a position at St. Bernard, which has been her home away from home ever since.

“When we first came to work here the school was just reopening,” Nix recalled. “We stocked our desks and offices from home.”

At the time there were only about 29 students in grades 9-10.

“The administrators didn’t even take any pay at that time,” she pointed out. “Then, in 1986, the monks took over and now, 31 years later, we are a middle and high school, with students from all over the country.”

“Back in the beginning we were in need of funds, so we came up with the idea of an arts and crafts fair,” she recalls. “The first year, 1984, we had 60 vendors, and let me tell you, we worked hard, tromped a lot of ground, shook a lot of hands, and made a lot of personal friends in developing the festival,” she said candidly.

Nix took her kids to every craft fair within driving distance to meet vendors who had the best quality items, and the most talented artists and artisans with unique crafts who would agree to take a chance on coming to new and unknown festival.

It worked.

“The first year we were going to have it on the soccer field,” she laughed. “But there was no shade. Panic set in about 5 a.m. when the first disgruntled vendor arrived. We moved it inside when it started to sprinkle and it was awfully hot in that gym.”

“I took things really personally back then,” she said. “But after all of these years I’ve learned to do what I can and leave the rest up to God. We’ve only had really bad weather twice in all this time.”

“People love this festival,” she said. “That’s evident by the growth. This year we were fully booked with vendors by December.”

The Bloomin’ Fest is now recognized by the Southeast Tourism Society, as one of the top 20 events in the Southeast in a group of nine states.

It gets hectic behind the scenes sometimes. The day of the festival Nix is up at 4:30 a.m. Thirty minutes later she has coffee brewing and muffins ready for the vendors. “The chaos usually starts around the time the volunteers show up, with everyone frazzled by eight o’clock,” she said.

She works the festival like a skilled maestro — orchestrating everything with a practiced eye and fine-tuning the smallest details, including placating volunteers and vendors with her calm demeanor. Moving from one area to another, she soothes the ruffled feathers of the crafters who didn’t get their favorite spot, helps a wife who has lost her husband and locked her keys in the car, and other minor crises that always seem to occur in an event this big. “It’s mostly just putting out fires,” she said. “I’ve long ago learned to roll with the punches. I give to God what I can’t handle.”

Her official title is “Director of Marketing and Public Relations”, which includes a wealth of organizing, keeping records on vendors, mailing lots of brochures, making sure that the Facebook and web pages are current, and ordering food for Bloomin’ Fest, as well as performing public relations duties for St. Bernard, keeping up the Ave Maria Grotto website and Facebook pages, making reservations for the retreat center, assisting with the annual alumni event, and organizing Dyron’s Low Country Fundraiser. She coordinates visitors, working with local restaurants and merchants to promote Cullman while she’s at it. In order to do all of that, and do it well, Nix has everything down to a science.

“Down to the nitty-gritty,” she says. It’s easier now than it was when she started. Back then there was no fax, no computer, no Internet, only a desk, a phone, and an old electric typewriter.

“I couldn’t do this without the help of the kids and volunteers who make my job much easier. We have 22 kids in high school, divided into eight groups, and everyone has a list,” she explained. “Come Thursday, I want this ready to go!”

By Monday, the peaceful campus looks as if it never even happened.

However, by late Monday afternoon, it usually hits Nix like a sledgehammer. She’s ready for a break, which is usually taken at home on the family farm on Goldridge Road — out back of her house in a cozy little cabin where she can finally relax, let her hair down and put her feet up.

“Bloomin’ Fest is a full-time job in itself,” she says. She and her husband also care for Tim’s father, H.E. “Shorty” Nix.

The 31st annual Bloomin’ Festival Arts and Crafts Fair will be April 18-19, 2015.

Ave Maria Grotto will be open for a reduced admission price of only $3 per person during the festival. A donation of $5 per person is requested upon entering the gates to the festival.

A 2015 Jeep Patriot will be given away at the end of the show along with a GoPro Hero 3 Camera, Nextbook 8” Tablet and an iPod shuffle.