By Ashley Lodato
Each year the Association of Washington Business (AWB) sponsors the Holiday Kids’ Tree Project, which provides gifts and food for families in rural areas and small towns during the holidays. The AWB relies on local fire departments to help determine need, and gives funds to those local departments to purchase and distribute food, books, and toys.
This year, the Holiday Kids’ Tree Project’s theme is “Heroes Near and Far” and thus involves Okanogan County Fire District 6. The AWB granted District 6 $1,000 for food and toys to be distributed in the community, and firefighters from the district were invited to a tree-lighting ceremony in the Capitol Rotunda in Olympia last Friday (Dec. 4), where Gov. Jay Inslee presented the checks and bags of toys to District 6 and to 17 other rural fire districts in the state.
Local firefighter Mark Crum and his wife, Sara, along with kids Arlen (8) and Macey (10), and firefighter Zack Gurney and his son Mason (4) and Cooper (8) all traveled to Olympia for the ceremony. Mason performed the lighting of the state tree, illuminating the 25-foot noble fir — a fitting symbol of the light cast by the noble acts of fire fighters near and far.
No sooner does Christmas tree hunting become a relatively pleasant experience in our household than does something else replace the interfamilial strife that the Christmas tree outing used to provide in such abundance. Selecting a photo for the family Christmas card used to be so easy; I would just choose the photo in which I looked the best, with little regard to how the rest of my family appeared. It was, admittedly, a shamelessly autocratic system, but it couldn’t be beat for efficiency.
Now, however, we have several forces conspiring to make the Christmas card process a most vexing one. First, we seem to finish the year with somewhere between two and four photos that include all four of us, which severely limits the selection, especially when I eliminate the ones that are unflattering to me. Next, someone’s eyes are sure to be closed in at least one of the photos, and although as long as that someone isn’t me the photo remains in my mind a viable option, I usually get outvoted.
At this point we’re usually down to one option, and there is sure to be a reason it can’t be replicated and sent to 60 of our closest friends. Which leaves us with no alternative other than to stage a family photo shoot — an event that could be best described as a relentlessly upbeat mom wrangling three sullen subjects into submission. When the photo is finally printed, it’s a picture that is indeed worth a thousand words, most of them unfit for print.
You still have four opportunities (Wednesday through Saturday) to see the The Merc’s Winter Wonder holiday revue, which features local singers, dancers, poets and actors. The whole show is very sweet, but it’s worth the price of admission just to see Renda Grim’s skit about Christmas cookies. Everyone’s going to be asking for the recipe when the show is over.
