Boys & Girls Aid Gala

The Boys & Girls Aid helps children find permanent homes in Oregon. Every year there is a Boys & Girls Aid Gala to help raise money for this wonderful foundation. The gala takes place in November/December and my husband and his office for the last couple of years have sponsored a tree. It's such a fun event and it gets the whole office involved. Plus, it's fun to dress up really pretty and watch the bidding.

How it works ...

There are so many ways to donate but I am just going to explain the big trees that get auctioned off. Basically when you sign up to be a donor you can either just donate the money and have the committee decorate a tree or you can be in charge of decorating it yourself. Each tree has a theme and a certain minimum donation amount. So for example, every year there has been a wine tree. It's the only "tree" that's not actually a tree. It's more a like a wood tower to hold a bunch of bottles of wine and then it is decorated.

The decorated trees get auctioned off and all the money goes to the Boys & Girls Aid Gala. So not only is each tree decorated but there are awesome items included with the tree ... like wine.

The first year our tree theme was a "Winter Wonderland." So it was decorated like a winter wonderland and it included items like: a snowboard and a weekend get away. This year our theme was "Games" so any sports games and actual board games is what was included. So there was tickets to sporting events, a fuse ball table, and a bunch of board games.

To decorate our tree this year, my husband's office had this awesome idea to buy a bunch of old board games from Goodwill and make our own game-themed ornaments. They all looked really awesome, but in the end we went with the traditional Christmas colored ornament balls and used a few of the ornaments we had made.

My job this year was to make Monopoly ornaments. They took forever to make and even though we didn't end up using them, they turned out pretty neat. All I did was use the Monopoly money and mod-podged them to a clear ornament (found at Michael's) and then I topped it off with some glitter spray paint.

And here we are in front of our awesome tree! It is so much fun to go and decorate your tree and walk around to see how other people are decorating theres. The themes are always amazing and it's so much fun to watch the bidding on the night of the gala. 

Can't wait for next years gala!

with.love

ashley