The City of Cupertino held its annual Breakfast with Santa event on Saturday, Dec. 6 at the Quinlan Community Center from 8:30 to 11:15 a.m. The event took place during three 45-minute periods with 15-minute breaks in between to ensure that many community members could attend and participate. Families ate breakfast provided at the event, consisting of pancakes, sausages, oranges and yogurt as well as beverages such as coffee, hot chocolate and tea.
Members of Recreation Event Volunteers, a leadership group designed to offer students and teens volunteer opportunities at local and communal events, worked to help prepareƒ the food, give out breakfast items and take pictures of guests with Santa Claus. Children were also encouraged to participate in arts and crafts activities such as making paper gingerbread men, creating ornaments of snowflakes and snowmen and writing letters to Santa, with the promise that Santa would write a letter back.
Volunteer Nolan Colton, who has volunteered at similar events such as the Halloween Monster Mash and the more recent Christmas Tree Lighting, helped the kids make snowmen ornaments at the event’s Arts & Crafts section. Colton explains his favorite parts of volunteering at these events are serving the community as well as conversing with other residents in the area.
“Volunteering is like helping the community, serving the community and seeing the joy that Arts & Crafts brings to people,” Colton said. “You can give them the ornament, and after you give them the ornament they made themselves, their face lights up. One thing I really appreciate about this is how you can talk to the parents. I talked to an old lady about crocheting and knitting, and then I just talked to someone about some random stuff. So it’s really cool.”
Junior Shreyas Dwivedi, who volunteered to make drinks for the event, agrees with Colton, acknowledging how even though the job is stressful, it’s still enjoyable to help others through his volunteer work.
“My favorite part about volunteering at this event is seeing the people happy when we serve them,” Dwivedi said. “For example, I served a kid hot chocolate, and he was really happy, which made me feel happy as well.”
Dwivedi believes the event was an overall success despite some minor inconveniences such as when a child sneezed into the marshmallow bowl, resulting in the entire bowl being replaced.
According to Colton, along with the minor difficulties with guests, there were also mismanagements in terms of organization and direction, especially for volunteers. While Colton admits that the management of the event was very busy, there were many factors in terms of timing and scheduling that could have been improved upon.
“Two minutes before the event, we were cutting out circles and stuff like that,” Colton said. “So that definitely needs to have more clear organization so we can see what we need to do and what things need to get done, so we’re not rushing right before the event starts.”
However, despite the rushed start, attendee Issac Delgado still thought the event was a success. As it was his first time attending a community based event, Delgado thought the breakfast and activities were a good chance to spend time with his family, community and especially Santa Claus.
“It was really nice to see that not only were we here to take pictures of Santa Claus, but he was interacting with the kids, like when he came to the table,” Delgado said. “The kids really enjoyed that one-on-one interaction with him.”
