Drive Thru Christmas Tree Market

Our club has hosted a Christmas Tree Lot for many years within the neighborhood.  It was fairly traditional with families strolling the lot and choosing their tree. The local high school football team volunteered with us to assist in carrying trees to the cutting table and then to the customer’s car. This has always been one of our biggest events and also one of the most community oriented!

2020 Pivot Plan

In 2020, we needed to pivot due to Covid. We worked directly with our local and provincial Health Authority Offices to plan a drive thru tree lot. In addition to the drive thru lot, we worked with a developer to create an online store with  a delivery option.

There was more hoops to jump through of course- many more than we expected. Thanks to connecting with our local health authority, we were able to have some guidance on what was expected and necessary to gain approval. However, when guidelines changed we were required to change plans again and add more safety details for our members and our customers. (See below under challenges ​for more detail)

Health Guidelines

Due to health guidelines, we could not include the local football team on the lot but the players and their families jumped in on helping with the deliveries. This ensured that they stayed in their family bubble and were safe. On the lot, no volunteers other than the Lynn Valley Lions were able to join us. There is an extensive PPE area for our members to get ‘outfitted’ in the proper gear, fill out their Daily Covid Form (via Microsoft Forms- FREE!) and get their temperature taken.

Another component to ensure all Lions follow the health guidelines and ‘stay in their zone’ was colored hard hats. Our club is lucky in that we have a few members that are in the same family. Due to that we were able to schedule the family bubbles into zones which were designated by the colored hard hats. Greeters wore yellow hard hats; cutters were in red; and tree lot staff were wearing green and blue hard hats. It’s definitely challenging to keep to this but it visually helps us to remember to stay safe and in our zones.

Online Component

One of the biggest pivot points and learning challenges was moving so much of the event online.

We used Eventbrite for registration- each customer had to pre-register for a time slot for the drive thru option and answer some standard questions (which covers us for contact tracing if needed).

​We created on an online store using Square Online.  We  had a Square account for payments so this was a natural add on. Customers were able to choose which tree they wanted to purchase and then have the tree delivered.