A Garden To Sow...A Garden to Tend...A Garden to Keep: Our Ladies' Spring Banquet

Remember my post from last year regarding our Ladies' Tea? We issued a challenge to the ladies to sign up for a table and decorate it. I was amazed at the creativity the ladies had! The tables were awesome. This year, starting last September, the ladies of HBC been studying through the Fruits of the Spirit. I thought a fitting conclusion to our year would be a garden-themed banquet. We came up with a theme of A Garden to Sow...A Garden to Tend...A Garden to Keep.

Instead of having the ladies sign up for just a table, we had them sign up for a table with a designated color. I hoped that it wouldn't stifle their creativity. Boy was I wrong! The ladies pulled out all the stops and the tables looked so beautiful. We had ladies sign up for: sage green, light blue, light pink, deep pink, light purple, dark purple, peach, pale yellow, white, & burgundy. (I'll let you guess which one I did. If you look closely...I've given you the answer.)

I didn't plan all this by the way. I had the help of my Organization Queen, Ashley Norris. Because of her, the banquet went very well. We had almost sixty ladies sign up. I was so thankful for all of her help and all of the time involved to make things run smoothly.

Dale Tock and Allan Bishop were excellent caterers. The food was top-notch! We had a chicken wraps (with apples and walnuts...yum!), beautiful salads, fruit, yogurt and chips. As usual, several men and young men in our church were our servers so we didn't have to lift a finger during the meal time (or after for dishes). One of our men volunteered to take photographs of each family too. What a blessing!

You'll notice several pictures of bouquets of flowers intermittently placed around the church. Those were made by a dear lady named Lena. She does this every so often around the church as her ministry. She did an excellent job getting the church ready for spring and for our banquet. If you look closely in the arrangements you'll notice packets of seeds or butterflies or even miniature gloves, shovels or rakes. What a nice touch for our banquet!

You'll also notice in the slide show pictures of several fresh potted plants. Ashley gave me the idea this year to ask a local nursery if they would be willing to let us borrow plants to help decorate our lobby. Tuttle's Red Barn in Dover (just two minutes from the church) was very gracious is letting us use some of their beautiful flowers. (We even sold some for them the day of the banquet!)

Mrs. Kristine Dean from Weare, NH (pronounced "wear") was our speaker this year and she did a wonderful job of concluding our study on the Fruits of the Spirit. It was definitely a devotional to take to heart.

What a great finish to a great year of meetings with our ladies. I am so thankful for our church family. God is so good to us.