The "It's a Wonderful Life" Rally

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Entry posted by -Gramps- · December 27, 2013

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Part uno of duo.

Before I started writing this, I was sitting at my computer browsing recipes online. I am planning my menu for Christmas Day brunch with my family. I have narrowed my entrees to Blackberry French Toast Casserole, Lump Crab Meat and Shrimp Quiche and a fresh fruit and honey yogurt salad. Diane plans on making some oatmeal and date muffins. They are a tradition every Christmas day.

This party will be for eight adults including my parents. Not as much preparation will be needed as the last party that I co-hosted. That one took place back on the first weekend of this month at an RV resort in Roanoke Rapids, North Carolina. The attendees, all thirty of them, are all members of the Colonial Virginians, our local FMCA chapter.

The planning for this Christmas Rally started last December at the very end of last year’s rally which happened to be at the same location. Diane and I, along with our close friends Gary and Janis, decided then to host this year’s event. The Christmas rally is the one rally that is catered, at least in part. We told ourselves it would be a lot of fun and less work to take charge of the biggest party we have all year if someone else does the food stuff.

I am not sure how we came to that conclusion because it isn't true. Our party turned out to need a lot of labor to pull it off.

We started planning the two nights, three days, rally with three things in mind.

We wanted it to be fun and meaningful so we had to come up with a theme.
We wanted people to attend and bring only their beverages to each night’s festivities. No need for plates, utensils or a pot luck dish. We wanted to provide lots of food for Friday night, a full country breakfast on Saturday morning, full traditional Christmas meal on Saturday night and a good continental breakfast on Sunday.
We wanted to do all this for around twenty five bucks a person. (That is what added to the work).
I had to get myself a Fedora. Okay that’s the fourth thing I had to keep in mind.

First thing was to work on number 2 and not forgetting about 3. Janis started looking for a caterer the first week in January. It took a couple of weeks and a lot of phone calls but she found one that would provide two meals, the country breakfast and the Holiday dinner. If we, meaning the four of us, sat up the buffet, the price was really good per person. That meant that we would have to take care of Friday night ourselves and Sunday Breakfast ourselves. We could shop for some things ahead but most of it would have to be done same day. Diane and Janis planned the menus, made some trips to BJs and the Dollar Store.

I came up with an idea for number 1. We were sitting at our chapter business meeting this summer at the Holiday Travel Park in Virginia Beach when it hit me.

I leaned over to Gary and Janis and said “We can make this an “It’s a Wonderful Life rally! We can show the movie on Friday night, I can set up my IAWL village and we can decorate the room with movie posters and snow flakes.” We also came up with the idea of having a trivia contest.

They liked the whole idea. We added one thing. We decided to make it a costume party as well. Come dressed in 1940s style or as a character from the film.

Now we had a plan. Over the next two months we worked out the details.

Let me tell you all something. I gave this rally a lot of thought about how we could make it special. I really wanted all our friends who attended to have more than a good time. I wanted them to feel something while there. I wanted them to feel close to their other members. I intended for this rally to use the Christmas season and the It’s a Wonderful Life story to reinforce the need for friends and family. I wanted to emphasize the Family in Family Motor Coach and have fun doing it.

I knew that was not going to be so easy.

The decorating became really important to me. The decorations had to be inspired by the movie. My village was all about Bedford Falls but we needed more. Together we came up with ideas that were simple but good.

Another trip to the dollar store and a trip to Andy our fearless leader’s house took care of it.

The rally officially started on Friday. Diane and I knew that to get everything done we needed to do we would have to leave on Thursday. That included emptying a lot of bays of chairs, grills, kites and loading lots of boxes of Christmas stuff including a whole miniature village, a tree and other items.

On Wednesday night at 8:10 pm I received a call from one of my customers. They are a telemarketing firm that makes calls to Las Vegas. Their office phones were dead.

I was supposed to leave the next morning by ten at the latest. The office had two separate phone systems and I was going to have to move all the lines and phones from the dead one to the one that was still working. There was no way I could do that before Monday unless I did one thing….drive forty five minutes to the site and fix them tonight.

That is just what I did.

I crawled into bed at midnight exhausted, but couldn't fall asleep for a couple of hours. I lay thinking about all that we needed to do including packing up the coach.

The next morning Diane and I started making the first of many trips from the house to the coach. After about an hour I lost count. I also lost count of the phone calls I received. It was one of those mornings after a not so easy night.

We backed out of our driveway at 9:50, pulled into the church parking lot next door, hooked up the car, checked the lights, said a prayer for safety and at finally made it on the road at 10:45 am.

We pulled into the Carolina Crossroads RV resort just before one. While I was setting down jacks and hooking up all the things that needed to be hooked up, a Monaco Knight pulled into the campground. Gary and Janis had arrived right behind us.

Now the real fun would begin.

I loaded up the car and delivered a bunch of containers to the meeting room. Not long after that the other three arrived and we started pushing tables around. The ladies decorated the tables including candles and silk rose petals, while Gary, using my ladder, started hanging snow flakes. We picked out a corner for the village. Gary and I successfully connected my DVD player to the large screen television, and hung movie posters in such a way they would not try to roll back up and fall off the wall. This last bit was very critical to the whole effect.

The decorating went pretty well. There was one that that didn’t. I forgot to pack the light bulbs for the 21 village buildings. Light bulbs went on our shopping list. That trip would take place early in the morning.

It had been a long first day. We all met at our coach for a one pot meal and some strong drink. During dinner we planned the rest of our attack.

Early the next day it was off to Wal-Mart. We divided our shopping list and hit the aisles.

It took a couple of hours to load up our carts, go thru the checkout lane and load up the Vue.

Back to the resort we went, off loaded and then finished the decorating. A few more snowflakes, a bit more painters tape to hold up the posters, lights installed in the village, a bit of snow, decorate our little tree, and then it was done.

The place looked pretty good. We found out later that the owner of the resort, who lives in Asheville, thought it looked so too. He saw it by way of his online remote security camera, called the managers and told them they needed to go take a look for themselves.

I guess we chilled out for a couple of hours. I don’t remember if I went back to the coach and watched television or read a book. I remember that it was really warm, windy and humid. I wished I had not unpacked all my kites and left them at home.

I spent the part of the afternoon walking around the campground handing out my printed itinerary for the weekend.

Four o’clock and we were back at the room. We sat up a serving line, started the coffee pots perking and made up trays and crock pots of goodies. We lit the candles on the tables, and dimmed the lights. I turned on a special CD of 1940s Big Band Christmas music.

The only thing left to really get this party started is for our friends to arrive.

By a quarter to five our members started to arrive with anticipation knowing (in part) what was in store for them.

Almost everyone who walked in the door took a look at the ceiling, hard to miss all the snow flakes hanging from above, and then gravitated toward the Bedford falls village with the chugging little train moving in a noisy circle.

I forgot to mention that our Christmas rally is also a Toys for Tots event and as such every coach provides at least one toy. Those items began to fill up a couple of tables placed on one side of the room.

The mix of drink and talk began. There was a month of catching up to do. For some it was even longer. I milled around and said hi to as many people as I could and then at five after five, I rang a bell (a sound they would hear a lot over the next two days) and when silence came, I officially opened the “It’s a Wonderful Life” Christmas Rally and Party.

I reviewed the itinerary:

Movie tonight at seven…popcorn will be served

Breakfast will be served at 8:30 in the morning including our Toys for Tots presentation.

Breakfast would be followed by our annual business meeting.

Everyone will be on your own until happy hour at 5:00 pm tomorrow night, followed by our Holiday Dinner with ham, turkey and lots of other things.

Also don’t forget that the hardest “It’s a Wonderful Life” trivia contest will take place during dinner as well as voting for the best dressed.

Following Dinner is our traditional “Don’t get too attached Christmas gift/steal exchange.”

“Now Come Eat!”

They did. They had a lot of choices, chips and salsa, mixed nuts, raw veggies and dip, spinach dip in a bread bowl, meatballs, spicy wings, (chicken not angel), b-b-qued cocktail whinnies (my favorite), crab dip, (my very favorite!), cheese and fresh grapes, pickles, green and black olives, cake, creme puffs, really good cookies, and other things I can no longer remember. There was plenty for all.

The tables filled up, lots of talk, lots of smiles, a few trips back to the serving tables.

At six forty five I announced that the movie would be starting in fifteen minutes. It would be a special colorized version of “It’s a Wonderful Life”.

“Concessions, including fresh popcorn, will be served at the back of the theater.”

Janis had purchased a mini antique popcorn machine which she was already heating up in the back on a table set up just for that purpose. We had popcorn bags, cookies and cake, and a special lamp to illuminate it all during the showing of the movie.

We cleared the banquet tables, which were located under the large screen TV, and placed all the goodies on the kitchen counter.

At seven I turned off the lights and rolled the DVD.

I suppose with any plans there can be technical glitches. I had one…audio too low. I was forced to push pause and halt the movie during an early critical scene. It took me a couple of minutes to find a way to up the sound from the max it was already it. There was a TV equalizer setting that, once all the sliders were moved to the right, increased the sound to a comfortable level. I continued the show.

Almost everyone had stayed to watch the movie. They all became really quiet. I could tell they were listening and watching it closely. During my chit chat and milling about earlier, I was surprised to discover that a lot of people there had not see the movie at all. The rest had seen bits and pieces of it. Not like me at all.

This would be my 100 and something viewing of the film.

Just before I started the movie, I took a few minutes to explain how important this old little film was to me.

I told them how “It’s a Wonderful Life” had saved my life.

I wrote about it here about a year or two ago I think. http://community.fmca.com/blog/62/entry-526-its-a-wonderful-life/

I like to think my little story was the reason for the total attention that the movie was receiving from all there. Maybe in part that was true….but a trivia contest could have had something to do with it as well.

The movie played….Young George got his ears slapped back, grew up, bought a suitcase, got married, had kids, yelled at some nasty old guy in a wheel chair, lost a bunch of money, thought he was going to jail, thought about jumping off a bridge, changed his mind, helped an angel get his wings, THE END.

The audience attending, like many others over the last seventy years, clapped at the end of the movie. Some, like me, wiped away a few tears.

Well, I can’t help it, I cry every time.

The party’s first night ended on a great note. I was told by many, as they filed out the exit, how much they enjoyed the movie. There was a chorus of good nights and see you in the morning.

The four of us cleaned off tables, threw away trash, swept the floor, put away leftovers, and swept the floor some more.

By ten we were on our way back to our coaches. We were all dog tired.

Gramps