I've generally gone most years in the past. In 2005 we had a booth for a Nursing school fundraiser & I swear it wasn't even 0 degrees out. We sold hot drinks & baked goodies to make money for our graudation. I remember my nose hairs frozen, my fingers totally numb, & my toes like pin pricks cause they were so cold...so it wasn't a "good" experience.
So imagine my desperate-ness this year when I decided to do a booth & sell cookbooks. Clearly I wasn't in my right frame of mind, but I was desperate to get these Volume 2 cookbooks sold. I got 27 boxes back around September or so & I've only sold about 4 boxes. Pathetic. I figured that this time of year they'd start selling faster but no luck. I don't know what it is...everyone who got a Volume 1 said they couldn't wait to get a Volume 2 but now that they're here no one is getting them. It's pretty discouraging seeing over 20 boxes of cookbooks in my house just sitting there.
So I needed to get them out & get them sold! I was so lucky that Dustin had that day off of work so he could help me get all set up. Plus a good friend of mine & her husband came to help set up, then we had my mom & another friend there to help sell. So we had some help...which was so nice!! I had hot chocolate, hot apple cider, coffee, homemade chai tea (from Volume 1), hot tea, plus about 10'ish different types of homemade goodies that I'd spent the last 3 days making.
When we went to set up it was a full-on blizzard, so Dustin went & grabbed a tarp so not so much snow was coming in. This made things very difficult because everything was getting wet...including all my books. So we put the books away so they wouldn't get ruined, & finished setting everything else up. Thankfully though, about 20 mins later it cleared up & was actually quite a nice, crisp (colder-than-cold) evening. Here's our booth:
On one table (to the right) was the hot drink stuff. Then on the other table (behind Dustin) was the table with all the goodies. Oh and yes, that is a heater. It was THE best heater... It worked so well that I didn't even need to wear gloves (you can see that all the snow was melted where the heater was too). So we had a great set-up...& managed to put a couple cookbooks out for people to see...plus signs.
We were literally running around like chickens with our heads cut off for the entire 4 hours! It was amazing. My mom was handling the food & money while Dustin & I had a perfect little system going with the drinks.
At the end of the night we went through FIVE AND A HALF boxes of hot chocolate!! That, by far, was our biggest seller. It was amazing! We only sold about 4 cups of coffee, a little chai tea, quite a bit of hot cider, 1 cup of hot tea, TONS & TONS of goodies, & just 4 cookbooks. But we did so amazing. Our prices were lower so we ended up selling more than other people who were selling the same things. I was soooooo happy & excited with our final outcome (even though the 4 cookbooks were slightly disappointing).
I'm so happy with how we did that I'm almost positive we'll do this again next year. I'm positive that we'll still have Brooklyn's medical bills a year from now so we'll do this again to help pay for that. :o)
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