One Month to our Easter Event

At Barbara’s place of work we are hosting an Easter Coffee Morning on Maundy Thursday, to raise funds for food for our local animal Sanctuaries:

• Wear Valley & Darlington Cats Protection,
• Kays Hill Cattery, Ark on the Edge Cattery
• and Stray Aid (which is a charity for dogs, but if they are given cat food they always pass it on to us for our cat charities)

Four weeks to go:

We have our preparations underway. Running alongside this, Babz is also organising a decorated or painted or dyed egg completion with prizes for children and adults, which will be judged that day by a local celebrity Sharon Griffiths author and long time journalist.
We hope this will attract more people to come along and help us to raise lots of money to help all the needy animals in care right now.

As all the Sanctuaries are overflowing we thought it only fair to share the proceeds rather than just one benefit.

So we have started shopping for Easter stuff, allsorts can be found in our wonderful £ shops here. For our contribution we bought some little yellow chicks, some pretty artificial eggs, a pack of Easter banners for the window and a pretty tablecloth for the food table.

Barbara’s firm allows her to spend so much from her petty cash on the ingredients for the scones and cakes and for prizes for the competition.

We already have some nice prizes for the raffle, which kind people have given us since the last event we held. She has sent out the press releases and designed posters and we have put them around our town. I have designed the invitations.

Three weeks to go:

We will be sorting out the prizes and deciding in what order to put them on the list, then packing them into a box to transport to her office nearer the day.

Two weeks to go:

I will be designing the menu and the tickets for the raffle prizes, I think I might do Easter chick and/or Easter bunny shapes.

Two days to go:

Babz will be baking her ever popular cheese scones and chocolate cakes and a lemon cake for those who don’t like chocolate. It’s always a quandry how many to make, we’ve no idea how many people will come, so, too few we run out, too many some get left. Although we do raise money from the shops and businesses in the street too who come for takeaways.

One day to go:

• Morning: we will be rearranging the furniture in her events room and ticketing and setting out the raffle prizes, getting out the cups, saucers, plates, spoons, knives, serviettes etc. we will use on the day.
• Evening: Babz will be icing the cakes and later we will pack everything in boxes ready for an early start in the morning.

THE Day

We will be up very early so Walt and Jo can have their time outside and hopefully will then come in and settle.

One Coffee Morning day Jozef went awol and Babz had to set off alone, by the time I got there she was frantically busy and very happy to see me. We have some friends who usually kindly help us because Babz has her job to do as well as being hostess.

I’m to and fro with fresh pots of tea and coffee and serving cake. Oh dear one old lady is never happy ‘My tea is too hot’ ‘My tea is too cold’ ‘My tea is too weak’ etc…. lol and we have some quite eccentric local characters come, some with no money poor souls, there is always a cup of tea and biscuits free for them.

So, Bryan helps wash up and Pearl and Aileen sell the raffle tickets for us and fill in the names on the back, sometimes it gets so chaotic it’s a free for all with people helping, but great fun!

When everyone has gone Babz has a mountain of paper work with lists of the prize winners and phoning the winners who weren’t there for the result.

I start cleaning up, always wall to wall crumbs lol then we deliver the raffle prizes to the winners who didn’t stay, then thankfully we can come home to our boyz and put our feet up for an hour.

I wish our PoC family could be with us that day but we will take some pictures to share and tell you all about it.

Ruth aka Kattaddorra