by Elaine Vo, staff writer
The annual Fountain Valley Tree Lighting allowed for many organizations, campus clubs and the community to come together and spread the holiday spirit at the Fountain Valley Recreational Center and Sports Park on Saturday, Dec. 6.
The Tree Lighting is a Fountain Valley event including business and club run booths, live performances from FVHS choir and FVHS dance team and a free firework show. There is also other activities such as making stuffed bears for $15, taking photos with Santa and donating toys to the Spark of Love toy drive.
“I think the purpose of the Tree Lighting is to have an event where the community could come together, bond and have fun,” said Tiffany Han(’16). “The kids can play games and everyone can watch fireworks and the tree light up.”
The event was a natural service hot spot for campus clubs such as KIWIN’S, California Scholarship Federation (CSF), Key Club and Operation Smile. Members of those clubs volunteered for the two consecutive days. During that time, they were assigned to set up chairs, assemble Christmas decorations outside, organize tables inside the recreational building and decorate the rooms inside the building. In addition to set up and decorating, clubs also ran booths or activities during the event and cleaned up afterwards.
“Basically, my club and I helped make the Tree Lighting event happen by setting up decorations and prepping for the actual lighting,” said CSF member, Jeffrey Phan (’17). “I would’ve liked to have gotten both shifts, but unfortunately every member was excited to help for this event so I settled for one.”
Tree Lighting is a popular volunteer event for the winter season, meaning many members were limited to specific amounts of shifts for each club. Some clubs were allowed to only volunteer on the set up day or the day the event was happening.
“Fountain Valley KIWIN’S has been participating in the tree lighting event for a while, but unfortunately we were not able to get spots to help during the actual event.” said Calvin Chau (’15).
Even so, many members saw this event as a way to give back to their community and make the holiday season a little more special.
“The club I’m volunteering for is KIWIN’S and during this event we got to go ‘behind the scenes’ of an event that many of us got to go to when we were younger,” said Vian Nguyen(’17).
