TreePASA- APASA Intern Holiday party
By APASA Intern Josh and Alice
A cozy wrap-up to our first semester as Interns, the APASA 2024-2025 Intern class hosted a lovely holiday party–TreePASA! Fully pitched, planned, and produced by our Intern class (with the help of our lovely Recruitment Directors Sage and Alex), the party had homey hot chocolate, APASA-iced sugar cookies, cute decor, featuring all of our lovely E-board members as ornaments, pasted on the windows, and of course, the main activity: dressing up Dylan, Kyle, Justin, Alex, and Josh Placido as Christmas trees–hence the name, TreePASA. We got to bond with our amazing member orgs, as the different groups competed over who made the best APASA E-board tree.
However, that quick summary does nothing to show all the effort, thought, and time that went into planning a General Meeting like this. As with all major assignments, even though we had finished our planning early on, a lot of our execution was left till the last minute. Literally the night before. I was working on graphics and decor, and our tasks were relatively simple compared to the others. Our committee divided up the board members, and made the APASA lotus-teal ornaments with their silly photos on them–names typed in comic sans, the best, of course–as a surprise. Seeing the reactions of everyone as they gawked at their personalized decorations brought us bouts of laughter that were never ending. My favorite part is that many of them kept their ornaments, showing that even such a little gesture had meaning to them.
Food and games committee–composed of the other interns, did not have as easy of a time as we did. As the night before our meeting everyone was coming back to school from Fall break, we were scrambling. We all gathered in Anthony’s apartment, rushing to create our decor, bake cookies, and gather supplies to execute our silly tree decorating activity. With frosting all over our hands, I remember trying to create APASA lotuses on each cookie without wasting any frosting, attempting to avoid a third trip to Target to buy more. And although chaos ensued, so did bonding! I remember listening to music curated by Anahita, ranging from Doechii to Tyler, the Creator, and singing with my fellow interns. We all vibed and had fun cleaning up and staying back to talk. It was such a memorable experience, and I loved every second of it, even though we were concerned about how the event would run.
But as we gathered inside TCC and began setting up the party, all the fear surrounding our party quickly vanished. Everyone took up their roles (shoutout Pushpita for assigning them) and started working, from hanging up fairy lights in heart shapes on the wall to handing out our APASA cookies. As the event progressed, we realized that all our hard work and planning paid off, and we were able to sit back and watch our beautiful tree models strut down a runway in a room filled with so many smiles. The holiday party is now something that we all now look back on fondly. It was a wonderful way to set the tone of our first semester as interns–building a community through each other, E-board, and the member org reps, and celebrating the advocacy and programming we accomplished!
