Candle night is one of the most special days in the Columbus School, where Christmas is celebrated in an event organized by the foundation.

Candle night happens the Wednesday of the week that is the actual (7 of December) candle night in Colombia. The school’s foundation organizes this event, and all percent of the money that they earn from selling candles, wood stikes to put your candles on top, from renting awnings for people to sell their stuff, and from the food trucks, goes to their savings for future events and donations.

“The candle night began because every year in December the core kids gave a little concert to their parents. At the moment, the school was new here in palmas and it was also candle night, so the school started to bring candles to sell. The years that followed, more people started coming so we began gathering people that wanted to sell their things,” said Mary Luz, Foundation Manager.

This event is very important to the students in the school and also to the foundation. For students, candle night is very fun and a tradition that happens every year, and for the foundation, it is crucial because it helps it grow and earn more money to help more kids and families that need it.

“We charge 120 thousand pesos for the awning; if the seller is very large it gives us a percentage of sales,” Mesa said.

Planning this event is very hard. The school’s foundation is the one that organizes everything, and the money they earn is donated to different foundations and families that need help with food and clothes.

“The first thing that we do is invite all the families of the school to this event, second finish the inscriptions for the awning, call every company and people that are interested to have an awning,” Sonia, Helper in the Foundation, Said.

This event has a lot of paperwork because every company or person that wants to be in candle night needs to be certified by Health Secretary especially to the companies that are selling food also is very important that these people are not in any kind of drug.

“Ask for documentation of the people that are interested in the awning, follow the payment, making sure that the paperwork is approved by the health secretary, send the paperwork to the health secretary which this is only for the awning of food and the people are working in the food business they need to have done blood tests, also the accessories awning need to have paperwork but much simpler,” Sonia said.