Season’s aGreetings from Garden aGlow
Be prepared. It’s the well-known motto of the Boy Scouts of America. And boy would they be proud of the CLM crew and our preparation for CLM’s annual holiday celebration for friends and clients at the Boise Botanical Gardens’ Garden aGlow light display. We decided this year not to have the event catered or staffed by anyone outside our employees. After all, we reasoned, how else can we better express our gratitude to clients and our best wishes for a happy holiday season than by rolling up our sleeves and taking it on ourselves? So, well before we greeted our first guests at the celebration, CLM employees’ home ovens were radiating the smells of holiday treats, Costco was trying to figure out how to restock their inventory of hot chocolate mix and Tate’s Rents personnel were developing the ability to identify some of us by the sound of our voice on the other end of the phone.
In the end the CLM Garden aGlow event was a rousing success, playing host to hundreds of clients, friends and family. Despite the often full and bustling tent, during clean-up we were surprised to find ourselves with literally hundreds (thousands?) of extra cookies, candy canes and other Christmas treats on our hands. I suppose there’s such a thing as being over-prepared, but I still like to think we would have made the boy scouts proud – especially since we could have fed their entire national contingent with our leftovers that night.
If you weren’t able to join us on Monday, all of us here at CLM wish you a very merry Christmas, holiday season and New Year. If you didn’t see our Christmas card already, we were proud this year to make a donation in all of our clients’ honor to the Idaho Children’s Trust Fund, whose mission is to prevent child abuse and neglect throughout Idaho. And for the record, despite the massive leftovers from the Garden aGlow event you won’t find each of us sporting new, looser-fitting clothing after the holidays. The Boise Rescue Mission (specifically the City of Lights Home for Women and Children) were thrilled to take the leftovers to use throughout the holiday season.
(A personal disclaimer is probably appropriate at this point, lest I leave myself vulnerable to attacks from my fellow coworkers: Due to the significant gap that exists between my baking prowess and the edibility of said baking goods, it was my privilege to contribute to the event in other, non-ingredient-mixing ways. So a great big thanks goes out to my sugar and flour-caked coworker friends who risked burned forearms and fingertips while tending to 450 degree ovens for the past several nights.)
CLM | Dec 21, 2011
