Is It Really Santa?
Each year for the past 11 years, Fraser High School’s Stduent Council has sponsored a Giving Tree at Christmas for children in need. This year, we received double the requests. Although most of the tags were taken from the tree, a few big-ticket items such as coats and boots remained. In addition, we received phone calls from our elementary school principals with last minute additions to our already large list of children. Because we didn’t want any child to be without gifts on Christmas Day, we had to think of a way to raise money and to do it quickly. Student Council members decided to dress up like Santa Claus, Mrs. Claus, a reindeer, and a present. They visited both lunchrooms during all lunch periods for two days. They asked students to donate the change from their lunch fee or any change they might have. No amount was too small. Students raised $250.00 in change in just two days. The remaining gifts were purchased and every child received gifts of clothing, a jacket, gloves, a hat, pajamas, or a toy. Dressing up was fun, easy, and profitable!

Haunted Homecoming
The activity/project that Stevenson used was the theme for our Homecoming, which was "Haunted Homecoming." This year's homecoming was on Oct. 26- one of the latest in the state. Unfortunately our school wouldn't allow us to have a "Costume Day" spirit day, but we used our theme for our "Fun Run" and our dance.

For the fun run, members of every class gather around our sports area- the tennis courts, track, football field-- our Senate (all-school representatives) creates a course for students to run and along the course they collect different prizes when reaching certain stations. This year we had people popping out from everywhere with costumes on trying to scare the runners. The Senators in costume would throw candy to the runners, making it like a "trick-or-treat" type run.
For the dance, we purchased things from catalogues such as Anderson's and Stumps such as a Haunted House, Haunted Gates, a "ghoulish ghost"-- these catalogues gave us a TON of ideas to go by and lots of things to order. At the main ends of the gym, where the DJ was, we had the haunted house with pumpkins, cobwebs, and strobe lights surrounding it. We also had a cemetery scene on the other side lit with green lights and spread over with black gossamer. We constructed a lot of gates and painted them. We bought black paper and lined the gym walls with it and hung purple lights everywhere to give a "night-like" affect. It turned out really well and we got a lot of complements from the staff and students!

Drawbacks include using the kits ordered from companies. Our haunted house was sent with very weak support so we had to use wood supports, which we bought with our own money, and put it together. It fell apart at least three times! The gates were also flimsy but stayed together throughout the dance surprisingly. Most of the things in the catalogues we could have made on our own and we did use a lot of ideas from the catalogue.