This year Cathalain was approached by a contact in our community to see if our church would like to participate in a Christmas Tree Contest for our Ward. It was taking place at the local Aeon Mall, which is a very large shopping center in our ward. It happened to be the weekend a huge concert was happening at the Dome, our professional baseball field, right next to the mall. This meant there would be thousands at the mall that weekend! This was an amazing opportunity for our church to participate in our community and gain visibility, and was once again from Cathalain’s willingness and contacts from being on PTA and various community boards.
At first, Cathalain was thinking an English theme since the English program would be the ones submitting the tree. After much thought, prayer and once again being moved to see that in all the Christmas merchandise not one thing resembled the real meaning for Christmas, Cathalain came up with the theme of “The First Christmas.” She tasked the interns in coming up with a concept and seeing it through. Our intern came up with different ornament ideas for the English students to create, and a short team from Washington state helped pull it all together in creating the big star topper and the stable.
This was our first year participating and our church/program is quite small. We were up against local factories, the Lexus dealership, the professional basketball team and multiple schools and organizations much much larger than ours. We were hoping to place in the top ten and were excited to find out we were ninth! It was fun throughout the weekend to see how many people from our English program, our mother church, and our church went to support and vote for the tree.
More than anything we are grateful for the thousands who saw the tree to have seen the message of Christ and the real reason we celebrate Christmas worldwide! What an opportunity!
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