9th Annual Troop 12 Christmas Tree Fundraiser

By Felix King, Second Class, Troop 12

Troop 12 helps the town of Cumberland with the Christmas tree pickup because the town does not offer pickup of used Christmas trees. This helps people in the town because a lot of people in the town do not own trucks or trailers to bring the trees to the dumping site.

The Annual Troop 12 Christmas tree fundraiser is the most successful fundraiser we have all year. We collect the trees by putting them into the back of a pickup truck or a trailer truck. We charged senior citizens $5 per tree, $15 for trees 8’ or less, and $20 for trees bigger than 8’. We use the money raised for our troop campouts to buy new supplies and to help scouts with camp/activity costs. Most of the money collected just goes to the troop, but some of it goes to the scouts in their scout accounts. A scout account is for campouts, scouting supplies, or uniform things that the troop doesn’t provide, or scouts can have extra money for the trading post at Yawgoog during the summer.

The scoutmaster made four routes in the town, and scouts and adults split into groups. To collect the trees, we worked together to pick up the trees and load them up into trucks, and the person driving would tell us if they were cash or Venmo. If they paid cash, we would use the buddy system to pick up cash from the house. We also used the buddy system if the tree was in the backyard. It was fun to collect the trees because I got to be with my friends all and our SPL taught us so many new things about scouting during the day.