December was a busy month for YALDAH. After coming back from New York, I was in school for only 4 days before heading back home for Chanukah vacation! Editorial Board applications started filling our P.O. Box. Emily Gordis, who’s training to be executive editor next year, flew all the way from Berkeley, CA to stay at my house for a few days and get some YALDAH training. Here’s a photo of Emily and Chavie Resnick, Subscriptions Manager, when Chavie also stopped over for a visit.
Emily joined my family for the first few days of Chanukah, during which I was very busy planning last minute details of the winter retreat. Emily, Chavie, and I headed off to the Winter Retreat early Thursday morning. Although it looked like this year we’d have a smaller group at the retreat, due to last-minute registrations we ended up with 40 girls! Every single girl that joined us for the retreat has such a special Neshama. All the girls got to know each other very quickly and connected with campers of all ages. I enjoyed the deep conversations my bunk had late into the night, and the fun trips and activities. I’m always blown away at the talent in our campers, but when they performed on Saturday night, they did it again! Dance, Drama, Choir, Writing, Food Decorating — all practiced and prepared in a few hours.
Saturday night was also the YALDAH Auction! Campers and community members who had joined us for the performance eagerly examined the prizes and put in their tickets. You could feel the tension in the air as we drew the winners for each prize. We know that the results were planned by Hashem, but we actually got to see that when a girl who had just lost her camera won the digital camera prize! Here are a few photos from the auction:

checking out the prizes
buying ticketspulling out the winnerspulling out the winners

You can see the list of auction winners here. Check out all the photos from the winter retreat here!
I came back to school and had to go through all the Editorial Board applications. Check out the new Editorial Board members here.
We’re getting started on the Spring issue, and set up a new e-mail system to make it easier to contact YALDAH staff. That’s about it – I’ll keep you posted!