The Blues

When Life Ain’t A (Cadbury Fundraising) Box O’ Chocolates

On May 20, 2010, in Family, Life, by Rosie

If you’ve ever sat on a fundraising committee, been educated in Australia in the 90s or naughties, or have young people attending school now, there’s a huge chance you’ve come across the Cadbury Fundraising Box. Essentially, it’s a carton-like box with a cardboard handle, stuffed full of treats and so portable, a 5-year old child could pick it up from the teacher and sashay it home.

In Aus, we have our Cadbury Fundraiser in the cooler months. By the time our little petals arrived home from school in summer, they’d be swimming in a brown, fundraising river rather than swinging their box of wonderful chocolates.

The handles on these boxes are great. They pull apart and concertina to the sides, revealing luscious lines of Freddo Frogs, Caramello Koalas, Cherry Ripes, Crunchies and Other Chocoholic Delights. Each larger-than-normal chocolate sells for $1.20 AUD, and the idea is to fob them off to family, friends or neighbours who don’t have kids at the same school for the cash.

Two days ago, Pip and Pop received their annual container filled to the brim with heady produce extracted from the cocoa bean. Their combined grins of joy upon showing me The Box melted my heart for a moment, and thankfully the day was cool enough so my cardiac muscle was the only thing that threatened to liquify.

Because they were carrying their school backpacks, books, drink bottles, a chupa chup (from a classmate’s birthday), some small toys, a couple of playground rocks (don’t get me started on Pip’s rock interest!) and their stories from the day, I offered to carry the Cadbury Fundraising Box of Bliss.

As we were chatting and shrugging through fellow parents and schoolmates, I bustled the box around the throng and we finally found ourselves at the foot of the pedestrian bridge we cross twice a day. It’s a large foot bridge spanning a very busy road. Many kids and parents use it.

Typically, we were on the top of the bridge with (perhaps) ten other people, behind us, in front of us, passing us. It was a beautiful Autumn day. The sun was shining, the air was still and crisp and the girls had come out of school in great moods. (Bolstered by the fact they now had about a million bucks worth of chocolate to look at and pester — hourly — about consuming)!

Just as we zig-zagged onto the second bottom span of the bridge (it slopes downwards rather than steps), I felt a jolt, a snag, a big RIPPING tear at my hand and all of a sudden, the contents of the fundraising box was all over the cotton-picking ground (the bridge is made of concrete, so I use ‘cotton-picking’ for effect only)!!

I had an instant mash of confusion, mayhem, pandemonium and frenzy on my hands. Pop Jones cried ‘OHNO!’ as though I had lost my leg or a magpie had pecked my eye out of its socket. Pip admonished ‘MUM! WHAT HAVE YOU DONE?’ like I had taken a knife and sawn through my own neck, or found a pitchfork and skewered our dog, Effing Jones.

For a moment, I stood there. Confounded.

Imagine if you will, a mother of madness, standing, straddling a gargantuan pile of fundraising chocolates, looking at them as though I expected them to hightail back into the freaking broken-handled box! Imagine my consternation that a Caramello Koala might have flung itself off the bridge and landed on a car below. Or worse, fallen into a bystander’s mouth with wrapper intact! Imagine the crowd of kids suddenly swarming around the goods, ‘ooooohing and aaaaahing’ in anguished chant with Pip and Pop.

Feeling embarrassed, I decided to attempt humour. ’Piñata! Piñata!’ I called, much to the horror of Pip Jones. Later she told me that she worried ‘other kids would pick up our chocolates and sell them as their own’ due to me advertising a free-for-all piñata!

Thankfully, they didn’t. Neither did a falling Freddo cause cars to crash below. Nor did the industrial-strength chocolates break or tear or get stomped upon. A lovely lady and her two children helped me, the woman having to actually touch my arm in order to bring me back into a reality where things weren’t happening in slow motion.

And the outcome? Well the fundraising box is completely ruined, but the chocolates won’t be marked-down as damaged goods. Oh no! In fact, the price of chocolates has increased by 10 cents each, due to the addition of ‘danger money’ for the carrier and the fame associated with purchasing what is the very first Chocolate Crash Test Dummy.

Cadbury has a new line, perhaps?