Retailers Get Into The Holiday Spirit
The weather has been cold as of late, but there is always a certain amount of warmth that comes from holiday decorations which makes the biting cold less abusive. This holiday season, Lottery retailers around sales Region #9 decorated their stores in a competition to see who could create the most festive holiday display using Nebraska Lottery merchandise. We recently took a small road trip to get in the holiday spirit and see how creative our retailers got with scratch tickets.
The first stop on our journey was at Casey’s East in Eagle where we saw a Christmas tree with nearly every single decoration was created from Scratch tickets. A chain of Scratch tickets hugged the tree while presents wrapped in the tickets rested beneath. Next to the tree was a Santa whose cotton balled beard and hat were the only non-Scratch tickets incorporated in his design. The employees clearly had put a lot of effort into it.
“I thought it was an awesome idea,” said Stina Trusow. “I loved how you guys sent so many voided lottery tickets. We kind of went all out.”
About 45 miles down the road we stopped at Speedee Mart in Nebraska City we found a fireplace constructed entirely of the voided tickets. Manager Alice Barton wanted to incorporate as much of the Nebraska Lottery into her display as possible and even dug up some old items from the dawn of the lottery in 1993. “I dug through my stuff and found a bunch of little things,” she said. One such item was an ice scraper she had with the old Nebraska Lottery logo.
We made our way to No Frills in Plattsmouth where we found an even bigger fireplace. Again, we were impressed with the amount of detail that went into the display. Intricate snowflakes surrounded the makeshift hearth. Linda Mckenzie was the master behind these flakes and said that each snowflake took approximately six voided Super Tickets to construct. “I told them I’m not volunteering ever again,” she joked.
In Louisville we found a gingerbread house at Tayler Quik Pik. Well, actually, we found a Scratch ticket house. Just as intricately designed as a gingerbread house, but not as sturdy, the structure was displayed in the middle of the store. Gum drops were delicately placed around the frame of the house and two gingerbread men stood guard; one on the chimney and one behind a ticket fence. Clerk Angie Oligmueller said that construction happened off and on for two weeks before it was completed November 30.
A similarly ambitious piece of holiday décor was setup at Mckinney’s Food Mart in Gretna. When we walked into the store to find the display we had heard about, it didn’t take long to find a three-foot tall reindeer standing before a sleigh constructed of cardboard and Scratch tickets. The display was made by Chris Wells who made it into a labor of love. She worked for an hour and a half every night for two weeks to put the display together.
There was a lot to see and words really can’t describe the creativity and ambition these retailers put into their displays. Luckily we took a lot of photos that you can view on Flickr.
Does your local Nebraska Lottery retailer have a holiday decoration featuring Holiday Scratch tickets that’s not shown here? Email photos to lottery@nelottery.com and we’ll add them to our album!
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