It's Beginning To Look A Lot Like Christmas...

My Youth Group was voluntold to decorate the church for Christmas this year after the last few years have turned up only a small handful of willing volunteers to decorate three giant trees, three miniature ones as well as to assemble the massive church creche.

Lost in translation was the fact that they were expecting only three or four youth to assemble all of the trees and crib. They booked us church space for six hours, which unceremoniously got slashed in half when an unexpected funeral arose. We were told we would need to come back the following day to complete our task with so little time.

I invited my whole Youth Group, as well as anyone who asked me about community service hours. The latter also invited their hour-hungry friends, and suddenly the expected ranks swelled four-fold. I had the big kids up on ladders decorating the large trees, I had some smaller ones on the ground with the miniature trees and I had the smallest putting balls on an individual tree as well as running around with a dustpan and broom cleaning up tree needles which were all over the sanctuary. All told, I had 14 young people show up which surprised me so much I ended up having to raid the priests' fridge to find sodas for everyone.

Obviously the old adage "Many hands make light work" is true when we completed our task, including clean up of needles, in under two hours. I fed desserts to the volunteers, promised them more hours if they came back to help clean up after the Epiphany, signed their community hours forms and sent them home, happy and well-fed.