National Doodle Day 2013

On Friday 8^th February Friday GAP celebrated National Doodle Day.

Eleven adults and fourteen children attended the usual session of Friday GAP and enjoyed tea, coffee, biscuits, squash, sweets and crisps whilst doodling to their hearts’ content!

Just whiling away the time?  

Certainly not!

Every participant paid £1 for the privilege of doing a doodle, 

and all the doodles will be entered in the National Doodle Day competition which raises money for the charity Epilepsy Action.

We also had a draw for ‘Which Celebrity’s Doodle is the Winner’ and had two lucky winners – Hannah Ritchie and Kieran Govan - who each went home with a lovely tin of biscuits.

All together the event raised £41 for Epilepsy Action.  Thank you to everyone who came and contributed.

We also ran our usual Friday GAP session including the bible story of Jesus healing an epileptic boy, had our prayer time with all the good and bad news supplied by the children, played a couple of games and sang some lively action songs (the adults were quite surprised at what we usually do at Friday GAP and how much energy is expended!)

So all in all a successful time!

Thank you to Christine and her team for running this event and to all the children and adults of all ages for taking part so enthusiastically.

Thank you also to Christine for the words and photos for this blog.  Don't forget if you are doing or have done anything for St. John's that you think everyone should know about let me know and I'll do my best to get it up here on the blog!

S-A.T.

Until the next time!

On Tuesday 8^th January all the Christmas trees from the festival were stripped, 

taken down and 

taken to the National Trust in Formby to be reused in their sand dune stabilisation project.

              

There was a lot to clean up afterwards and the bagging and cleaning was undertaken by a small but thorough team.  The church was spick and span by the end of the day!

A big thank you to everybody 

who helped

take down and clear up.

Then on Friday 25^th January tree sponsors and representatives of the charities were invited to a meal in St. John’s hall.

John thanked everybody for turning out despite the dreadful, snowy weather.  He said that it seemed to be generally agreed that this years Christmas Tree festival had been the best one yet!  He thanked all the sponsors and charity representatives for all their contributions to the festival and commented that without them it could not have happened at all.

Clive then outlined the program for the evening which was to consist of entertainment from Julie Ann and some of her students followed by a buffet supper and ending with the second half of the concert.

Julie Ann introduced her students who, together with Julie, put on an excellent and varied program of piano and saxophone playing, recitations and of course singing.

Sue, 

Harry,

Lydia,

Laura,

and Lucy put on a superb show both before and after the supper break.

Thank you to everybody who contributed to the evening including the excellent caterers!

We hope to see everybody back next year if not before!

Put the dates for the next festival in your diary 

– December 13^th & December 14^th 2013 !

Charity Christmas Tree Festival 2012

On Wednesday 5^th December the boards came out of storage, 

.... were covered and moved into place .....

.... for the arrival of the Christmas trees later in the day. 

On Thursday 6^th December 

representatives from schools, organisations and charities came in to decorate the various trees. 

The same day the flower arrangers were in decorating the church.

On Friday 7^th December all the plugs and wires were sorted and linked ready for the opening and “switch on” later in the day.

About 5.30 p.m. the main doors were opened and people came into the church to be ready for the opening at 6.30 p.m.  At first there was a trickle but soon people were pouring in!

The church was buzzing, and so full of excited people that Clive struggled to get everyone’s attention before he could welcome them and introduce our vicar, Jeremy.   (Many visitors had to sit in the choir stalls as there was no room elsewhere!)

By the time Jeremy, welcomed everybody at 6.30 p.m. the church was absolutely packed.  It was standing room only and there was not much of that left either!

After Jeremy’s welcome, Clive introduced Wendy Cheetham (head teacher of Farnborough Road Infant School) who was to open the festival.  Before she did that however, she announced that some of the children had come along to sing for us.

At this point the children stood up and turned round to face the back of the church.  (It must have been quite intimidating to suddenly turn round to see the masses of people that had accumulated behind them!) Under the leadership of their teacher, Helen Pritchard, the children sang a variety of Christmas songs, modern and traditional, with great gusto! 

(I have said it before and I’ll say it again “There is nothing quite like infants at Christmas”!)

Once her children had finished Wendy gave us a quick glimpse of a “child’s eye” view of Christmas before Clive whipped everybody up into an enthusiastic count down to the “switch on” of the lights on the 34 trees in the body of the church. Then she pressed the button!

After the lights had been switched on many people moved on to the market next door as others took their seats for the next part of the programme of entertainment.  

This was the Farnborough Road Junior Singers accompanied and led by their teachers, Sue Barton  and Mandy Harrington.  

Their program began with a soloist singing the first verse of "Once in Royal David's City".

It continued with a diverse selection of Christmas songs, including carols, old and new .... .....interspersed with comic recitations. 

The final part of the evening’s entertainment was provided by The Octave Choir.  

It is not easy to follow two excellent children’s singing groups.  

However, this choir managed to do so magnificently.  As Clive put it as he introduced them – they may not be as young but he was sure that they were just as young at heart – and this they proved to be!  
Their finale was an assemblage of Christmas songs set to a variety of music written by Mozart.  The audience were encouraged to see (or should that be hear) how many different tunes they could identify.

The entertainment over, visitors were able to get a better look at the trees.

On Saturday 8^th December, the trees were lit and the church doors opened in time to welcome our first visitors at 10.00 a.m.  

From then on there was a steady stream of people coming through to admire the trees before going through to the Market and café.

33 of these trees represented different local and national charities.  As usual the trees were all sponsored by local businesses or individuals and decorated by representatives of the charities themselves or local schools or church organisations.  What had started out as almost identical trees now looked very different from each other - many typified their charity. 

Of the other two trees in the church one is the church tree under the East window and the other the Prayer & Remembrance Tree on which visitors were invited to hang their tributes and prayers.

Thank you to all the people who worked so hard to make the festival a success – the organisers, the sponsors, the charity representatives, those who performed for us and the many, many people who visited.  A particular “thank you” to Wendy Chetham for agreeing to open the Festival and, of course to John Feneley who spearheaded the whole project and worked so hard d to make it a success.  Without John our charity Christmas Tree Festival simply would not have happened.

Well done everybody!

Buckets of pennies for buckets of water

If you have been here before you will know that this year the theme for our Holiday Club, WOW3, was Water (see below).  

Following our discussions at the club, we decided to save “Buckets of pennies for buckets of water”.  This took place during the holiday club and continued in church throughout August.

Yesterday we collected in the buckets and Joyce, Gordon and I (with welcome help from Hannah) spent over two hours counting and bagging the money.

 

[Hannah arrived part way through “the counting” with a bag of coins from home, because she and her family had been away all summer and thus unable to contribute before.  When she saw us ploughing through all the coins she very kindly offered to help.  We were very grateful to her as without her help we’d probably have been there all afternoon!]

Anyway, all the hard work was well worth while as the final count revealed that the buckets had contained £181.36!

In addition to this £156.45 had been raised at WOW3 itself because nobody would accept payment for any of the resources or items for the items for the “shop” that they contributed to the club!

And then there is the £60 raised when one of our helpers auctioned one of her paintings after the WOW3 service (see below).

So, altogether we are sending £181.45 + £156.45 + £60.00 (i.e. £397.81) to WaterAid.

Thank you everyone for your prayers, generosity and hard work.

For more information on WaterAid visit http://www.wateraid.org