Picture Perfect Cooking

Friday night was our local American Cancer Society Relay for Life.  For those of you that don’t know, it is an all-night fundraiser for the ACS.  Our team from the courthouse has been raising money since January with bake sales, soup lunches, and one cookout.  The money from the food sales and the money raised by a little girl in the local Relay Kid contest added up to over $4500.00 for our team!  I don’t have the exact amount yet but we did very well since our original goal was $2000.00.

The teams were supposed to host fundraisers Friday night so we decided to sell fruit kabobs with dip and fruit smoothies.  I went to Wal-mart Thursday and purchased all the fruit and other odds and ends that we would need.  We ended up with 180 kabobs and enough smoothie mix to make 200.

The cancer survivors at Relay got a free smoothie from our booth and something free from every other booth.  We were prepared to make some money and hopefully top the $5000 mark.  Alas, it was not meant to be.  Mother nature had other ideas.  The local funeral homes set up their tents for the teams to use.  After ours was set up, we started decorating…and listening to the thunder in the distance.  The events were supposed to start at 6:00pm and just a few minutes before that it started raining a flood! 

A lot of people that were there left because it rained for almost 30 minutes!  We were having to push water off of the roof of the tent every couple of minutes so it wouldn’t leak and there was no way to walk around outside the tent.  We ended up making $65 that night, not near what we had hoped, but we had a good time anyway. 

The theme for the whole Relay was The 1980’s , so our booth was decorated like The Love Boat.  We had music playing and a ship’s deck backdrop.  It looked really cute.  Our activity for the night was “The Newlywed Game”.  We had a married couple of each of the other teams to participate and the people working the sound system had found the theme song to play as well!  They came to our booth before the game to answer their questions.  We had them onstage to compare answers just like in the game show.  Everyone seemed to really enjoy it and the winning couple was one from a local church that had been married the longest, 22 years!  The only question they missed was the husband’s first question, “What is the color of your wife’s eyes?”  They got the rest of the questions right!  It was so funny!

The luminaria ceremony later in the evening was so moving!  The bags with candles had been placed around the side of the town square we were using and lit.  It was beautiful! Each bag had the name of person being honored or memorialized by a loved one.  After the ceremony, everyone walked a memory lap with the Sarah McLachlan song “I Will Remember You” playing.  It was very, very touching!

I am so glad that we all participated in this and look forward to doing it again!  I encourage people to get involved for it is an extremely worthy cause!  C & I have both had very personal experience with cancer.  C’s paternal grandfather was diagnosed with lung cancer shortly before he passed away.  My maternal grandfather passed away from brain cancer in 1994, and my mom is a SURVIVOR of stage 3 ovarian cancer!  GO, MOM!!!!

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