Hey everyone, so my church does an Oktoberfest every year as a fund raiser and social event around the end of September/beginning of October. It's quite a fun time, there's beer, polka music, dancing, games, and raffles. The raffles are the big thing for my wife and I, mainly because this year we were kind of in charge of the basket raffles. About a month prior to Oktoberfest parishioners donate baskets of things and everyone is given the option to enter raffle tickets to win the baskets. These cover all kinds of things; bird feeders, alcohol, american girl dolls, lego sets, luggage, lottery tickets, coolers, gift cards, action figures, activity zones, and others. There was also the premium raffles of a 65 inch TV with PS5 and game, and a trip to Mexico, each with individual premium tickets. We sold tickets before and after mass many weeks, and bought about $200 worth of tickets over the month. In total there were 103 baskets, which I think was a record. The cool thing about the tickets is that they are "buy a sheet of the same number, write your name once," which saves a lot of time. Leading up to the weekend mskate was doing lots of things to get ready, organizing baskets and setting up decorations.
Friday was family night, a night of activities more geared towards kids and families. We had a petting zoo, pony rides, Disney music bingo (from the same guy who does music bingo for us at other times of the year), a "Taylor Swift concert" with a look alike lip syncing to songs, a videogame trailer, a kid spa trailer, minigolf, and pumpkin painting. It also had some normal Oktoberfest things like the beer garden and sausages, and the basket raffle (which we were kind of in charge of). My volunteer shift started at 7PM, so I had time to come a little early and enjoy the festivities. Well, it was also VIP day at Chuck E Cheese, where pass holders got free dipin dots, 500 tickets, and 30 points (on top of the daily points they already get with their pass). I decided to go to chuck e cheese and get my VIP stuff, and "speed run" my points so I could get to family night. Normally 40 points lasts me about an hour, but I also play "longer games" and take my time, but I had to go through 70 points and so I played the "token eater" games, basically jumping from one game to the other before it fully registered. I made a couple hundred tickets on this, and kind of fulfilled a childhood thought of "how fast could I blow through my tokens." Lots of fun regardless.
I got to family night around 5 PM. I had a sausage for dinner, and played some minigolf. There wasn't a whole lot for me, but was kind of fun looking around. It ended up being a good thing I was there since the volunteer that was working the videogame trailer didn't show up and they needed someone to be "the rule enforcer." The videogame trailer was either 4 or 5 TVs set up with multi-player games (minecraft, mario kart, lego marvel, and something else I didn't see), and a long couch for everyone to sit on. Players were only to have 15 minutes if there was a line, but could have more time if there wasn't a line. I had to make sure the line was managed, kids weren't overfilling the trailer, don't let kids with food or drink in, and to pay attention to if kids have had their turn. A couple of times I helped set-up Mario Kart since I know Mario Kart. I didn't have to end the turns very often since it wasn't very in demand. Once I helped a grandpa get in the trailer to look for his grandson. It was a pretty cool thing. Some people asked me for business cards and I'm like "I'm with the church, I don't know the business, talk to the guy with the blue shirt." A little after 7 someone came to relieve me, it was his shift. Young guy, showed him what to do, and all went well. Hopefully he was able to be "authoritative" considering he seemed to be around the same age as some of the teens that would go in.
After that I went to help mskate with the raffle. I was going to help enter tickets, but there was some confusion over the numbers which meant we didn't enter the tickets that night. The POS system was square, which is what we use for when we do art fairs. This came in handy when I rang up some items wrong, which made canceling them easy. The Taylor Swift "concert" was pretty good. The impersonator looked pretty close to Taylor, and she had the sparkly jacket, and did all her mannerisms that I know. At first I wondered if she was actually singing, but then I heard the "studio production" in the songs and knew it was lip sync. Oh well, still a good concert. Eventually she joined the audience to dance with the kids, and this is when things got a little weird. The DJ "ran out of Swift songs" and started playing Katy Perry songs (firework and roar are the ones I remember). I'm like, "ok, now you're just breaking character." Oh well, I don't think the kids were paying that close of attention. At the end of the night we moved all the raffle baskets into the social hall, which was kind of involved since we wanted to keep the same layout as the tables while keeping all the ticket buckets with the baskets. Also at the end of the night the left over food was free, so I picked up some sausages to have for breakfast and lunch tomorrow.
Saturday was the big night, full Oktoberfest. During the day we figured out what was going on with the ticket numbers, and got all the tickets entered. We also were running out of tickets the night before, so we ordered more on amazon prime to be delivered to our house. We got to the church around 4PM and did the set-up. I set-up the computers for entering the ticket numbers in the look-up table, and as we were selling tickets I was entering them. There was a slight problem, I needed the wifi password and I couldn't find anyone to give it to me; well at least not immediately, I found someone who had it pretty quickly. Mskate also brought here laptop, and it was kind of funny how I had my gaming laptop next to her basic business laptop. Oh well.
About an hour into the night I got dragged into an event. They needed people for the mug holding contest, where you hold a beer mug out perpendicular to your body, and as the game went on they'd add beer to make it heavier. I wasn't really planning on participating, but one of the old ladies who knows us was like "come on I'm sponsoring you in the contest." I'm all "uhhhh, OK I guess." I get up there and I get this 5 pound glass mug. I was saving my arm for the competition, as was everyone else. Once it started I held up my arm, and my arm started cramping. Not quite sure why, I was shaking my arm out and warming it up, but I basically immediately started feeling the burn. I was one of the first people eliminated, and only had a little bit of beer poured into my mug. I was going to hang around and see what ended up happening, but there was a bit of a problem with my laptop and I had to run back to the table and fix it. I was able to fix it no problem, basically someone minimized the web browser or clicked off the tab and lost it among my sea of tabs, and all I had to do was pull my browser back up.
I think sometime around this time is when mskate went to our house to pick up the raffle tickets we had to amazon next day delivery order. The night before we were running low on raffle tickets and mskate said "I'm going to order more tickets because we're going to run out." That was good because we would have run out had she not ordered more. Well they were supposed to arrive before the night began at like 3:30, but they kept getting delayed and arrived at 5:45. Mskate ran home to get them when she got the notification that they were delivered, and that was really good because we ran out like soon after she got back. Later in the night I had a sausage for dinner, and then got a soft pretzel as a long snack while entering the tickets.
It's now nearing the end of the night, which means we were now doing the raffle drawing. After the ticket was drawn one of the other volunteers doing the drawing would give me the ticket and prize, I would look up the number, and mskate would write the name. One of the tickets was entered wrong and we had to have a completely different volunteer go through all the tickets looking for it. It was generally well organized, but not perfect. We figured it out though. As I was going through the numbers we ended up winning 3 baskets; one of the alcohol baskets, the crock pot basket, and the hands on science center basket. Also, with the admission bands there was a raffle for a trip to the Bavarian Inn, and mskate won, so in total we won 4 things. Unfortunately I didn't win the big screen TV and PS5, but here's the funny thing, it was our music director's 7 year old son. His dad was both happy and not happy, because while it was a great prize now they had to find a place for it. Some people picked up their baskets that night, but a lot didn't and we had to put the baskets in the social hall. We loaded our baskets into our car, and in the morning I unloaded them.
I'm going to go over all the stuff by basket.
- The Crockpot Basket
- A crockpot
- A box of 3 crockpot liners
- A set of salt and pepper shakers
- A $25 Meijer gift card
- 3 cooking utensels (a slotted serving spoon, a non-slotted serving spoon, and a meat masher)
- 2 packets of crock pot seasonings
- garlic salt
- a cookbook or recipies
- Alcohol basket
- A bottle of strawberry wine
- A bottle of tequila
- A bottle of fireball whisky
- A bottle of rum
- A bottle of spiced rum
- A bottle of of dry gin
- A bottle of of vodka
- A reusable wine bottle
- A case of Local's Light American Lager
- A case of smirnoff ice zero
- A pack of solo cups
- A pack of solo shot glasses
- A novelty giant solo cup that was the basket
- A sign that says "bar open proudly serving whatever you bring."
- The hands on science center gift certificate
- A $400 gift card to Bavarian Inn Frankenmuth
Sunday night was pretty cool, it was the big 50th anniversary dinner after the mass celebrated by the arch bishop. Since the arch bishop was there and there was an attack on a Mormon church earlier that day, there was quite a police presence and they secured the perimeter. It wasn't just the arch bishop, there were also all the past priests who came to celebrate, including the first priest from 50 years ago (he was in his 80s). It was a pretty cool mass, it's been a while since I saw a mass celebrated by the bishop. Dinner was pretty good. I had a rum and ginger ale, and for dinner I had green beans and beef tenderloin. It was a good way to end a good weekend. Mskate still had some work to do with the baskets, calling people to tell them "you need to pick up your basket," and one lady thought it was a scam since our area code is from our hometown and not where we live, but that's just kind of her story. Well this has been Pokematic, signing off, and bu-bye.
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