Box Social

As some of you might know I am co-chair of the Family Home Evening Committee in my ward. This means that I get to plan and carry out activities every Monday evening for anywhere from 15-50 people. When I first received the calling in August, I decided that my co-chair and I should meet and try to plan three months in advance instead of trying to pull together ideas each week. Andrew and I met and planned out activities until Halloween. While we were planning, my roommate mentioned that her ward in Idaho once did a box social. My only experience with a box social is watching Oklahoma, where Laurey’s basket of food is bid on my Curly and Judd, the two rivals for her affections. Curley even sells his saddle and horse in order to win the basket and date with Laurey.

The point of a lunch box social in the past has always been to raise money. Women would make a meal and place it in a decorated basket or box. Men would then bid on the boxes. The top bidder would then share the meal with the maker of the basket of food. In order to simplify the process we decided that it would be a dessert box social instead of a lunch box social. Also, we decided that people would bet with skittles instead of money since we were more interested in the social aspect of the situation.

We had a hard time publicizing it because of Stake and Ward conference but we did the best we could, including sending a Facebook invitation to those ward members that use Facebook and an e-mail to the entire ward. We planned to do it at church but found out the night before that it wouldn’t be available. We planned on having it outside but it rained. Despite these two bumps in the road, it ended up to be a good experience. We ended up with 28 people, which is actually pretty good for an activity that hasn’t been attempted in our ward before. 15 girls and 2 guys brought boxes. 11 other guys showed up so we were almost evenly matched. It was so fun to see how each of the boxes were decorated. Some people just used a simple gift bag but some really went all out. For example, Marne made one that looked like a box right out of a Mario game. One girl did leopard print and another used green duct tape.

My co-chair, Andrew, was the auctioneer and he did a great job. My box, with two pieces of cake from Gloria’s Little Italy, was bought by Tyson, who is friend of mine. All the couples sat down and enjoyed their desserts (although a few had three in their group since girls outnumbered guys.) People who had never really spent much time together got a chance to talk and get to know each other. All in all I think it was a pretty good activity. I totally give props to R, my roommate, for the idea.