My 2 minutes of fame on National TV!!

Thank you. We are supposed to have reps from Make A Wish come pick up their money tomorrow.

Just for a quick follow up to our fundraiser for Make A wish Foundation. My wife and I spent 12 nights outside handing out candy canes to the spectators that took the time to get out and deposit money in our donation box. All in all, we made 13692.78$ .

 Not bad at all considering this was our first time ever to raise money. When I applied to have all the legal papers, one of the questions was "How much money do you expect to raise?"
Since I really didn't know we would have been on radio 3 times, TV 3 times and local newspaper twice, I thought if 500 cars came and gave 1 buck, then 500$ would be a good estimate. Boy was I out to lunch on that one. One deposit that I made had over 150Lbs of rolled up coins. Let me tell you that by the time I reached a teller, my arms were shaking, my legs were dull and my back was aching. Looking back now at what we did, I forget about all these personal problems.

The story that touched me the most was this man asking me if I was the mastermind behind this setup. I laughed and said more geek than mastermind. He wanted to shake my hand and thank me for making his life that night. I laughed and said "With these lights?" He pointed to the back of his car and I say a severely autistic kid (I work as an Education Assistant with kids like this one) and the man said his son hadn't smiled and laughed like this in 6 years. His eyes started to water up and mine as well, of course. His son was maybe 7 or 8 years old. I said that was the reason I made this display, for kids like him and young and old alike.

By far, this has had to be the best Christmas season ever. Seeing all these faces of young and old enjoying the show was spectacular for my wife and I. We had songs from the 30's to 2006. It touched everyone's generation.

I already sequencing for Halloween because it is in only 294 days away!

Well last night it was on the national news so it got viewed by even more people. Last night alone, there were well over 60 cars that lined up to see the show. The most we ever had was maybe 70 cars from 6pm till midnight on Christmas Eve last year so I'm sure we'll have even more people coming to see it. Even the local press is coming tonight for an interview.

I wonder how much patience my neighbors will have with this huge increase in traffic!!! 

Congrats! And yes, 2hrs is usually the norm when they have a good story. Its a good bet the remainder will be used as 'B-Roll' footage for the weekend news - maybe even as an end-show bump.

Edit: Since you don't have an Aurora banner as your tag-line on the PC site, you won't qualify for kickbacks.


Edited by LightChristmas - 09 Dec 2011 at 4:23pm