Last night was our annual Blue & Gold banquet for the pack. It was yet another successful B&G and better yet, I was rather removed from the event. Better only in the fact that the event was in good hands of several others and they simply didn’t need me to a large degree — I was able to take care of the action items that I was responsible for and stay out of their way otherwise. It was awesome!
My job was to arrange for the OA to be there for the awarding of the Arrow of Light, build a new bridge for the crossover, and put together a slideshow — that was it!
The decorations were excellent… lots of creativity and I’ll bet a few visits to pinterest. :-)
The centerpieces were small artificial fire pits on each table. I took a photo of them, but it turned out blurry. What was really creative though was the printed menus. The way they were printed and folded the resembled paper neckerchiefs. VERY creative!
It’s tough to see from this photo, but if you look closely you’ll see the resemblance.
The highlight of the night was the magician… all of the kids (and adults) really enjoyed that part of the evening and I have to say the guy is incredibly talented and works extremely well with the kids. To top it off, he is VERY affordable. This was the second year in a row that we’ve used him for our B&G. Not sure if we’ll use him again next year or not, but most definitely in the future. We’ll leave that to the committee to decide though.
To cap off the evening, we awarded the 2nd year Webelos with their Arrow of Light awards and crossed them over to their new Boy Scout Troops. It was the inagural voyage of the new bridge.
With the 12 center boards being removable it actually worked out very well. It was unfortunate that we had a delay in the arrival of the Arrowmen from the local OA chapter as their ceremony is quite an experience — we had to keep the program moving along as it was getting late and cub scouts were getting restless. We fortunately had a plan B ready which included each of the 2nd year Webelos reciting an element of the scout law while handing a plank to a 1st year Webelos scout who took the plank and put it in its place on the bridge while the 2nd year Webelos Scout explained the meaning of that element. This was repeated for the rest of the elements until the bridge was completely built. Then it was time to cross the boys to their troop.
The AoL and Crossover ceremony was really good — in the absence of the OA ceremony. It’s going to be tough to decide next year on which we will want to do as I can see a new tradition emerging here.
In all, it was a great evening and I believe all 100+ in attendance had a really good time. A tad long, but really good nonetheless. My hat’s off to the B&G committee and all who helped pull it off. We have an awesome pack!
