Thanksgiving-Christmas Party | Life and Day to Day things by a Pond Lover

The Austin Pond Society held their last meeting of the year this past Monday, November 21st at the usual location of the Zilker Botanical Gardens Meeting Room. Close to 50 people were in attendance to help celebrate this final meeting of the year.

The room was set up with round tables each seating 12 people and almost every table was taken. The tables had green tablecloths and in the center of each table was a Poinsettia plant that were later donated to different members. There was also a large scrap book on each table of events of years gone by about the Austin Pond Society from it’s inception in 1992. A very nice touch. Sparkling up on the ceiling and on any member who happened to walk through the beams, a thousand lights shone and twinkled.

The first 30 minutes was for mingling and visiting and eating hors d’oeuvres and consuming adult beverages. People were checking out the scrapbooks. This being a pot luck, our members never let us down and the desert table was just full of scrumptious goodies, all I’m sure, loaded with calories. Who cares, they tasted great.

The main meat dishes were provided by the Pond Society and consisted of Beef and Ham. The members provided all of the fixin’s. There was not much food left at the end of the meal as it was all delicious.

Following the meal, Barb Lenhardt introduced Mark Wester who is the representative for the Brown Santa Christmas Gifts for needy families. Brown Santa is the name of the Christmas program put on by the Travis County Sheriff’s Department and is this years cause for the Austin Pond Society members to donate unwrapped toys for the kids. There were two cart loads of donated toys, a wonderful response from the membership.Thanks to all of you for your efforts. You have helped to make it a great Christmas for some needy children.

The Brown Santa is a hard act to follow but the Pond Society was not done yet. Every year we donate a part of the proceeds from the Pond Tour to some needy cause. This year, the cause was closer to home as a check for $5000.00 was donated to Kat Newland who represents the Zilker Botanical Garden Conservancy (ZBGC) to help pay for the renovation of the ponds and streams in the Zilker Botanical Garden Center. The existing system is leaking and long overdue for an overhaul.

Following the check and gift presentations the Membership got back to the serious business of having fun. Many of you may have noticed that some of the Members had lost any notion of dress sense that they may ever have had and were adorned in sweaters, ties hats and other garments that under normal circumstances would have belonged to a Fancy Dress Parade. These are, normally, just your average people and here they were dressed in the most outlandish of garments and what was worse, flaunting themselves in front of the entire room of people.

Turns out that they were all participating in the Ugly Sweater Contest which was not just limited to sweaters. Ties, hats, suspenders, skirts and all kinds of odd garments were on display as the membership proudly joined in with the fun.

This was the last event of the evening except for the group shot at the top of the page. This group reverted back to their teenage years and had me take a picture of them acting strange. I couldn’t resist and displayed this one in black and white. Anything to stop those ugly sweaters from blinding my vision.

Following the frivolities, the group quickly pitched in to help with the clean up and to gather up any foodstuffs which may have been left over. I know there wasn’t much.

This meeting concludes the year for the Austin Pond Society as we do not meet next month, December. The next time we get together as a group will be January 16, 2017. We would like to wish all of our friends and members, a Happy Thanksgiving, A Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. See you then.

There are four videos for you to watch.
The first is the wining and dining of the Members,\.