Image Credit: CFJC Today

By Adam Donnelly

PANDEMIC PARTY POOPER

Many Kamloops Christmas parties cancelled due to COVID-19

Nov 26, 2020 | 4:22 PM

KAMLOOPS — Christmas party season is nearly upon us — or, would be, if not for COVID-19. Across the city, hundreds of workplaces will be cancelling their annual Christmas parties as a result of the pandemic. That means designated driving services and taxi cabs won’t be as busy, and venues will remain empty through the holidays this year.

As the time ticks down until Christmas, many of us would be starting to plan a fun and festive holiday gathering. However, COVID-19 has put a damper on any kind of Christmas gathering this year.

“We’ve lost, in total, about 72 events this year,” Nicole St. Godard tells CFJC Today. St. Godard is the Food and Beverage Manager at the Coast Kamloops Hotel & Conference Centre.

On a busy night during the holiday season, the Coast Kamloops could host several parties spread across multiple spaces in the hotel. When you tally up the numbers of folks they’d welcome across all those parties, it adds up quickly.

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“A thousand people, likely,” St. Godard says. “We probably didn’t always hit that, but we could probably hit that [number]. We would see 500 people for the multi-company parties in the ballroom, alone.”

And once the holiday spirit starts flowing, many of those folks would have turned to Operation Red Nose for a safe ride home. The pandemic has put a stop to Red Nose in 2020.

“It hurts, for sure,” Carolynn Boomer, PacificSport Interior BC Executive Director says.

PacificSport has helped run Operation Red Nose Kamloops for the past 24 years. Through the program, they receive significant funding from donations. That money goes to help pay for registered athletes’ travel expenses, as well as education for coaches and athletes.

“It’s generally around $30,000-to-$40,000 annually that we receive from client donations and sponsors,” Boomer says. “Without the client donations this year, we’re looking at around $10,000 as a revenue stream [from Operations Red Nose].”

Back at the Coast Kamloops, St. Godard says they’ve trimmed their staff from around 40 people down to just two. They’ve also had to cancel one charity event, and have moved another online.

“We were trying to run the Festival of Trees this year, with Berwick on the Park, in support of Kamloops Hospice, but we just didn’t feel it was socially responsible to keep moving forward with that, even if the order changes on December 7th,” St. Godard says. “It’s also impacted our Breakfast with Santa. Last year we raised $9,000 for the RIH Foundation. This year we’ve had to slide to virtual, and we have our fingers crossed that it’ll be that great, but who knows?”

Until we manage to put COVID-19 in our rearview mirrors, that uncertainty remains.