It's already ten days into the new year and our board has been reflecting on what we've accomplished in 2023 with the goal to continue making the Bethpage Chamber stronger so we can continue to support community events and our membership.

We left off on our blog last September when the big trifecta celebration was planned for September 30th and October 1st between the 100th birthday of the Bethpage Water District, the Central Park Kiwanis Fall Street Fair and our chamber carnival, which hasn't been done in a decade. Even with the horrendous storm that kicked off the weekend with local minor flooding and lingering showers, we had a stellar weekend. The BWD's amazing Drone Light Show that was sponsored by H2M and PMI was definitely the highlight and the first ever public drone light show on Long Island! Since then we've seen several others pop up around the region.

It was a lot to coordinate with our orgranizations, sponsors and local authorities but we do hope that the Bethpage community was able to see the show and attend the fair and carnival. We hope to bring the carnival back again and are planning the potential dates for 2024, which depends on several other factors and their availability. Please comment if you attended!

Then we launched into the Small Business Season campaign for the holiday shopping season which we hope you found informative and entertaining. Our local merchants reported a good busy season and hosted their own events that we did our best to interact with and share. We have to focus on our current paid members for the privilege of sharing and posting local happenings to be fair to our members and give them a boost. If your business feels that it missed out on our promo sharing, please log in to check on your membership status or just join the chamber now and start saving now on your marketing budget for 2024. Just by being a current member your advertising in our local South Bay Neighbor is steeply discounted.

The 31st annual Holiday Lighting Ceremony featured a locally grown evergreen! A resident inquired about the possibility of it's use as the Christmas Tree and our holiday committee checked it out and thanks to our member's contacts got it out of the tight spot in the yard with a crane and brought it downtown. So thank you to the Wheeler family on Linden for their donation and to our helpers to cut, transport and install the tree. They include: Don of Campagne House, Billy of Ciminelli's, Ronnie of RG Electric, Fabio's Landscaping and the BFD and the Firefighter Juniors for all the hard work to get it done and decorated.