Moorestown Community House Starting New Holiday Tradition

What’s Rockefeller Center got that Moorestown doesn’t? (OK, besides the Today show and an ice-skating rink.)

Pretty soon there’ll be one less thing, when the Community House launches a new holiday tradition next month with the lighting of Moorestown’s own holiday tree.

The event will be held Monday, Dec. 2, and will be featured in a live broadcast on CBS3, with Moorestown’s own Kathy Orr.

Amanda Park, resource assistant for the Community House Capital Campaign, said the idea came out of the board of trustee’s outreach committee, which is tasked with “trying to find new and better ways to involve the community in the community house.”

“We really wanted to create a positive and festive event that would unite everyone—friends, families and organizations,” said Laurie Palko, trustee and chair of the Tree Lighting Committee. “I could not be happier with the positive response that I’ve heard from people all over town. Many groups have heard about it and called us directly to see how they could get involved. This kind of unity is what Moorestown, and the Community House, is all about.”

Board president George Schulmann added, “The tree-lighting celebration embodies all that the Community House stands for in that it creates a new memory and further bonds people and families to each other and to our town.”

There will be plenty of other festivities, as well as free food and drink, at the event, including:

• An “Elf on the Shelf” reading by Chuck Gill
• Musical entertainment by the Moorestown High School Madrigals
  
• Cookies donated by Wegmans
  
• Free hot chocolate offered by Brandywine Senior Living

The Moorestown Home and School Association will also be on hand collecting non-perishable food and warm clothing for MooreKids and the Ministerium Food Pantry.

The event begins at 5:30 p.m. and culminates with the lighting of a 20-foot Norway spruce—the same tree, by the way, used at Rockefeller Center (though theirs is bigger)—donated by Pete Palko, in honor of his mother. Park said the tree will be planted, courtesy of Depenbrock Design, Inc., near the Moorestown Memories statue.

The event will be followed by a “drive-by visit” from Santa on the fire truck, according to a release from the Community House.