American ABC's - February Theme

Its time for your annual Blue & Gold Banquet! This month serving a dinner, it might not be a bad idea to appoint a Chairperson to manage the Blue & Gold Banquet. This is a time to celebrate the birthday of Scouting! The banquet idea started informally in 1933! Michigan Pack 1 Committee members were thinking it would be great to get together with families as well as the Scouts. So Father & Son "bean dinners" began and the father and his cub scout were busy whittling away wood to make serving spoons for the dinner. Family potlucks began to be commonplace also. Now, you think of this timing...we are talking right in the heart of the Great Depression, yet families were reaching out and "doing their best," just as the Cub Scout Motto proclaims. It was in 1943, it officially began to appear in BSA literature as the Blue & Gold Banquet commemorating the Scouting Birthday.

Our theme this year is very wide open for a variety of ideas. One pack will be traveling Route66 discussing cities along the way and eatting hotdogs and chips. Simple and FUN! Wanna celebrate with pizza? How about New York style, Chicago style or Hawaiian pizza? Celebrate in a monumental way with our National Monuments!

Post a USA map and hand out tiny dot stickers for each family to mark 5 places they have lived or visited...see if your Pack has been in ALL 50 states.

Post the National Monuments and see who KNOWS their National Monuments. Assign families to make a poster about places they lived or visited complete with pictures, travel brochures, maps, etc and you have wall decorations. Table toppers can be so simple as cutting an old map into a square.

Please make sure all the Cub Scouts are awarded with something this month. Check at the Trading Post for temporary patches if you have some scouts that have not earned anything since we have all been busy with the holidays. Take a moment and think about those that are serving in scouting positions...RECOGNIZE them also!!! We all like a pat on the back from time to time. Each month we should be making our award ceremonies just that...ceremonies...presenting them differently each month will make it more exciting and inviting ~ and it makes a memory!

I love each of you for all the work and effort you put in behalf of our future Boy Scouts!!! Keep up the great work! Have great fun at your Blue & Gold Banquets!