Before our elementary school was expanded and during construction, we held our spring carnival off site: for many years at a Natl Guard Armory and for a couple of years at a local junior college. It worked great!

Our school has their holiday shop during the half days of parent teacher conferences. It's located in the cafeteria since we do not serve lunch on half days. Can you schedule your shop during that time?
Have you thought of having your shop on a Friday night & Saturday in your gym? Set up would be after the last gym class and families can shop with their children at the time that is most convenient.

I also like the idea of an offsite end of year celebration. Considering your construction issues, it may be more feasible to bus the kids to a local park and you can have the event there. You just have to be more organized in having the teachers do head counts several times during the day, but by setting up a tent for lunch & use of the park's bathroom facilities, what would be the difference.

Oy Cindy--okay tie one hand behind your back and jump up and down on one leg for 3 days...no that isn't the event I'm suggesting but given your challenges when you untie your hand and stop jumping this will seem a bit easier .
Do you have any offsite options..perhaps rent a theather for a showing of a holiday movie (there always is one and our theaters will allow us to rent out the movie showing and open it up to our children). Is there an indoor outdoor pool you could rent for the night--we do our Bobcats in the Water and it was a terrific hit with the families....in the winter it is a bubbled pool so we can do the igloo swim as well...how about ice skating or roller skating...
If you must be at the school...perhaps a jingle bell jog. We do one of these and it is really just the children coming in and getting all jingle belled up and then jogging around the school and coming back to cookies and milk and letter writing to Santa. You could maybe combine that with a nutritional program for the children. It's almost like in the school you couldn't do anything too popular cause too many folks would come...
Hope these ideas spur you onward. You may be able to rent a large tent and heater for outside to hold the holiday shoppe. Those stay pretty warm and then you could serve hot cocoa and donuts like the Kris Kindle marts they do in Germany.
Good luck....d

Right now our school is in the middle of a major transition. We are getting a new prinicipal who is very nice and seems great to work with. But our school is doing a major reconstruction on the school. We have 3 wings and one wing will be totally shut off during the school year. We will also be short on parking due to the construction.
Here is my dilema our Santa Shoppe uses one of the rooms of the wing being closed off. Because of the construction all the classroom are being used so I will have nothing available. I am looking for something to do in place of it. That wouldnt need so much space and time we do this over a 3 day period.
Also our Family Fun Night at the end of the school year. We usually have bounce houses, games, food etc. Low on parking and I am not sure where I would put the games outside.
I need some other ideas.

Another note we have no PTO room so most of our stuff is in storage and we will have to do some major digging for stuff when we need it.