Of Kiosks and Customers : Ventura: About 40,000 visitors enjoy a return to clear weather and stock up on handmade gifts at the Holiday Street Fair.

For Steve Nishi, Christmas shopping is work.

Nishi slumped in a metal folding chair Sunday as his wife, Kris, paid for wintergreen jersey pants and a top, gifts for her mother.

“I’m getting a job done,” he said, holding a bag of purchases on his lap.

But he admitted that he preferred strolling through Ventura’s Holiday Street Fair, as he and his wife did Sunday, to trudging through a mall.

“It’s outdoors. There’s a lot more activity going on, music and food,” said Nishi, 30, an escrow agent from Oxnard.

About 40,000 people flooded Main, California and Chestnut streets and Plaza Park downtown to shop or browse at kiosks set up by more than 600 artisans from all over Southern California.

Usually held the first weekend in December, the fair was rained out last weekend, the first time any of the 57 street fairs held in Ventura over the past 17 years had to be canceled due to bad weather, said Faye Campbell, the city’s director of special events.

Last Sunday, all of the woodcarvers, jewelry makers and other artisans had already arrived and laid out their wares when the rain began in the late morning.

But most of them made the return trip to the rescheduled fair as the weather cooperated with blue skies and mild temperatures.

Some vendors said sales were down slightly compared to past years, but the trip was still worth it.

Geraldine Doughty, 60, sold clown dolls with plastic faces and cloth-and-wood bodies draped in various brightly colored costumes, each priced at $25.

The La Mirada resident said she sold about 20 dolls by Sunday afternoon, less than half the amount she normally sells at Ventura street fairs.

“People have looked. People like. But they just haven’t bought,” she said. Overall, Doughty said she has sold about 2,000 dolls this year at various fairs.

Doughty and her 39-year-old mentally retarded son have lived on the income from the dolls since 1983, she said.

Merchants weren’t the only ones who came back Sunday. Some shoppers who showed up before the rain the previous Sunday also made a second trip.

For the second Sunday in a row, Barbara Villetto drove to Ventura from Thousand Oaks and her friend Judy Davis came from Reseda, determined not to let the previous week’s rain interfere with their annual shopping tradition.

“I dislike malls,” said Villetto, who works as an X-ray technician at a North Hills hospital. “They’re impersonal, the prices are higher.”

The street fair has “very, very different merchandise, good prices and very pleasant vendors,” she said. “I wouldn’t push through crowds like this at a mall. It’s not pleasant.”

Villetto pulled out two of her purchases, a pink satin Christmas tree ornament and a cream-colored bowl decorated with hand-painted flowers.

Besides being stocked with tree ornaments, wreaths and other Christmas paraphernalia, the fair offered all types of dolls, unfinished wood furniture, dried flower arrangements and rack after rack of dangling earrings.

One booth featured brightly colored pillows, wall hangings and clothing sewn by a cooperative of Laotian families based in Santa Barbara.

About the only thing all the merchandise had in common was their handmade character.

Campbell said the fair’s organizers screen the kiosks before shoppers arrive to make sure the wares are handcrafted. On Sunday, they asked three vendors whose clothes looked factory-made to leave.

“They were things you see in all the stores,” she said.