.14 Goodgymers turned up at the Community Centre last night for what promised to be a spooky evening of Goodgym spirit at St Luke’s church. After being warned to be nice to the ghosts and to not get eaten by any resident falcons, we set off on a walk which had been deemed to be far too short. This meant that, after arriving, we were promptly told to go away again. Not because we’d been really annoying (I think) but to do what we call a ‘meet and retreat’. This involves pairing up, moving around the perimeter of the church at your preferred speed, doing an exercise when you found your partner, and then moving back to where you started. Competitiveness is entirely optional.

After everyone had returned, we were armed with various sizes of cutty things, which is the technical term, and set loose on the graveyard to conduct a Goodgym haunting. Our instructions basically amounted to ‘fix it’, so we resorted to the destruction of unruly plants. There were very, very many to choose from. We battled bushes of brambles to uncover hidden gravestones (one which included a rather well-preserved anchor), had a fight with some allegedly non-sentient ivy, and created the world’s biggest piles of plant as proof of our victory.

There were protests when we had to finish and threats to stay in the graveyard all night (you know, like normal people) - our Goodgym spirit is just too strong! We were convinced to stop the haunting before the exorcists had to be called in and herded to the front of the church for some more exercise. A circuit of fun awaited us, involving running, jumping, and trying to figure out how to do the bench one without just looking like you were sitting down. Then, tired and happy with our inspired success, we all went home with our spirits high.

After branching out into decoration-making at a recent group run, we were ready to spruce up our entry to St Luke’s Church’s annual Christmas Tree Festival.

Sheila, Sol, Nicola H and Nicola J were the GoodGym elves tasked with making our 5ft tree look merry and bright, and thanks to a pine effort from everyone we were able to decorate it with an array of snowpeople, reindeer, bunting and origami shapes. Special mentions must go to Georgeta for her beautiful quilted star, and to Sheila for our fabulous crocheted GoodGym angel - complete with garden tools!

Don’t fir-get to stop by over the weekend and visit the festival, which is open from 8-10 December in support of Number 22 community counselling services. Keep an eye out for some other wonderful entries from our friends around the community too.

It’s the most pun-derful time of the year, so how else would we describe today’s mission other than…tree-mendous!

More details can be found at www.stlukeschristmastreetrail.co.uk

Well done to all the GoodGymers who came along this evening for a fun mix of scavenger hunt, Christmas crafting and cake. Our official Christmas night out is tomorrow at the Off the Tap pub quiz, but this evening felt like a party to me! Maybe I've been to too many 5 year olds' birthday parties recently...

Of course there was some method in our madness. I will explain in reverse order:

The cake was to celebrate Claire's 50th good deed. Claire's first good deed with us was rescuing baby toads, her 50th was making reindeer, and in between she's done everything from planting oak trees to marshalling a Santa dash in fancy dress.

Congratulations Claire, we love having you in our group! A huge thank you also to Rachel, who made a fabulous chocolate cake AND a free from lemon drizzle.

The Christmas crafting was our task for the evening. We were making decorations for the first GoodGym tree at the St Luke's annual Christmas Tree Festival. The festival raises money for the church, plus their chosen charity, No 22, the Maidenhead and Windsor Youth Counselling Service.

The festival is also a great way for charities like GoodGym to raise awareness of their involvement in the community, and many of the trees (including ours) are donated to families in need after the event.

It is a really festive spectacle, and very much worth a visit while it's open to the public from the 8th to 10th of December. Click here for full details.

Many thanks to the Maidenhead Community Centre for providing us with a venue for our crafty task, and to the GoodGymers turned elves, who led our various crafting activities.

Nicola made sure we weren't flagging while we made bunting; Jess's snowmen were the stuff(ing) that Christmas dreams (and nightmares!?) are made of, and Sophie and Claire had us making reindeer. I Donner know how they were Blitzen so many! As the evening unfolded I also renamed myself origAMY, Can you guess what I was making!?

A special mention also for Georgeta and Sheila, who weren't with us this evening, but who have still made decorations for the tree. Georgeta has made a beautiful quilted star including the GoodGym GGs and Sheila has crocheted a gorgeous doll, complete with GoodGym t-shirt. I can't wait to see them on the tree!

And the Scavenger Hunt..?

Since the Community Centre was also our start location, there was no real need for a run or walk this evening, but I wasn't about to let everyone wriggle out of doing some exercise. Before we settled down to our creative gluing, cutting, folding, and tying, I challenged the group to a scavenger hunt. They had no more than 25 minutes to find and photograph as many things from my list as possible - including things like a dog, a snowman and a post box.

We formed two teams of walkers and two teams of runners and gave the walkers a head start while the runners warmed up. Teams devised their own routes and impressively everyone ticked off everything on the list and made it back to base on time, having covered 2-3km on foot. There were also some very creative photos taken along the way, and some entertaining chats with dog owners. I think next time I will need to make the challenge a bit trickier!

Thanks everyone for your contributions to a fun evening. If you would like to help hang the decorations on the tree at St Luke's, there is one space left on this community mission next Wednesday from 4-6pm. Do also check out the listings for all the group activities planned so far for December and January. Hope to see you soon!

This evening's group run took us to St Luke's Church in Maidenhead, where we tidied up around gravestones and celebrated a milestone - Georgeta's 50th good deed!

Most of the evening was spent looking forward to celebratory cake. While we were thinking about the cake, we also enjoyed doing lots of other things:

• The runners had a chatty 3km run to the task - thanks to Juli for knowing the way and Jess for back-marking
• The walkers covered 1.5km - thanks Sheila for walk-leading
• We found it quite exciting and a bit spooky being in a dark cemetery. Particularly since the vicar had warned us to Luke out for dead bodies...
• We trimmed the lower branches of 3 or 4 trees, shifted some logs, cut back brambles, cleared up litter and swept up lots of leaves.
• Steve, Jess, Fiona and a hand fork had a fight with a root and lost
• Diya and Anita had a fight with a holly branch and won
• Kanika and Nicola felt watched by the resident falcons (the ones responsible for the aforementioned dead bodies!) whilst litter picking the perimeter
• We pondered whether the church had a steeple or a spire or both. Thanks to Steve for post-session research confirming that St Luke's has a spire. Thanks also to Kanika for sharing that a steeple is the whole tower of a church and the tapered top bit is the spire. I was starting to feel confused so did some of my own research and learned that the father and the nephew of the architect of the spire at St Luke's both had the initials G.G....
• Kanika's research also revealed that a spire can be the young shoot of a plant. St Luke's definitely had those! It was lovely to see these signs of Spring pushing up through the ground. The snowdrops were particuarly pretty.
  

Finally it was time for cake and celebrations. Thanks to Sheila for her beautiful and scrumptious chocolate cake, and to Anita for amazing homemade namak para savoury snacks and fabulous brownies. And thanks to Georgeta for giving us a reason to celebrate by doing 50 good deeds. Well actually it's 51 now...her good deeds are piling up so steeple-y we can barely keep track!

Georgeta is a regular group runner, and also one of the most active mission runners in our area. Whether she's tackling a hedge, designing a bed for potatoes, or fishing a tree stump out of a stream whilst balancing on a few twigs, Georgeta always faces the task with good humour and impressive strength and determination.

Her approach to fitness is similar - not only does she walk, run and cycle, but she has been known to run in wellies and to cycle gloveless in freezing weather and to still reach her destination smiling. She also makes a heavenly carrot cake and is a skilled seamstress. You can admire her zig zag stitches on our GoodGym flag next time it has an outing.

Georgeta, congratulations on the huge amount you have done to help in our community over the last year. You're an in-spire-ation!