The Girl Scouts in Troop 8252 learned first-hand when they spent a day in Pasadena with other volunteers, cutting flowers and other tasks to prepare floats for this year’s parade – themed “2010: A Cut Above the Rest” – to air on Friday, January 1 at 8 a.m.

“It was not easy, but the girls did a good job – they stuck with the task,” said troop leader Colleen Teeman of Castaic. “There’s not a lot of girls that want to stand there for hours and do this kind of schlep work. But our girls really stuck it out. It’s something for them to be proud of.”

Girl Scout float decorators have the opportunity to learn about the creativity and science behind float building and decorating, work as a team to meet the New Year’s Eve decoration deadline, and experience the thrill of accomplishment as millions of viewers see their work. Girl Scouts can also earn a Rose Parade Float Decorating badge, an Interest Project Award, or a Tournament of Roses patch.

“This is the first year the girls in Troop 8252 have ever done this,” Teeman said.

All residents of Castaic, the 11-year-old girls who worked on the floats were Mackenna Teeman, Jada Williams, Maddie Murphy and Brooke Rapko. The group spent the entire day “dry decorating,” which involved several mundane tasks, including filling hundreds of miniature vials with water that would later be used to hold flowers in place. The girls also cut the purple part from numerous lattice flowers that will eventually be used to decorate a float.

“We basically stood there for hours getting everything ready – it was not easy for us to do it, and we can deal with a lot more than what kids can. So this shows the character of the girls,” Teeman said. “What we did was get everything ready for December, when we go back to do more decorating.”

Since the Rose Parade is a New Year celebration for all, the girls get to be a part of something unique and positive for others to enjoy, said Maura Rountree-Brown, Chairman of the Tournament of Roses Decorating Places Committee who is also a Girl Scout troop leader in her community.

“As they go through life, it’s good to have service both for human need and for human celebration. As an organization, it’s very important to the Girl Scouts to have their members experience projects in a way that is meaningful both for the girls and for those they serve,” Rountree-Brown said. “It wouldn’t be enough for Girl Scouts to show up and put one flower on a float and say they had performed a community service. They want Girl Scouts to be involved in all aspects of a project and they will be encouraged to do so throughout their lives as well.”

Any of the float builders would say that the construction and decoration of a float is not possible without the kind of team effort that was exhibited by the Girl Scouts, Rountree-Brown continued.

“Volunteering to decorate a float makes them a part of a team of designers, builders, drivers and other decorators,” she said. “It may seem like a smaller effort to fill a flower vial or cut up blossoms but the success of the design and the construction rests on the hours and hours of details and small steps, and it’s a part of building character to know that every step is important, no matter how big or small. Some of the people who hold supervisory positions for the float builders started in much the same way as these four young women.”

Mackenna said, “I feel happy about our accomplishment. It’s a really good show and it’s really fun to watch it. It’s going to make me really proud knowing that I helped work on these floats.”

Jada’s favorite part of the day was “cutting the flowers because they could go on the float.” When she sees the floats on New Year’s Day, “we can say we cut that. It makes me feel happy.”

Maddie said the experience “was fun, but we had to have a lot of patience because everything we did, we just had to do it over and over. I learned that there’s a lot of patience in having to do all that...when I see the parade, I’ll be pretty excited to know I worked on it and I’ll point it out to my parents.”

Brooke said the day helped her realize just how much work goes into each enormous creation. “I actually thought they just stuck the flowers on the floats – I didn’t know all the flowers were in vials with water. It helped me realize how much time and effort people put in just to make one of these floats.”

There are far more volunteers who work on the parade than paid workers, Rountree-Brown said. “There are 935 active Tournament of Roses volunteers alone who, along with our retired volunteers, spend more than 80,000 hours a year on the parade and supporting events,” she said. “If you think in terms of the number of volunteers it takes to decorate floats, that’s thousands more. And that would only cover those two areas of a much larger effort to produce the parade. You have service organizations, the Red Cross, and many more who make the Rose Parade a part of their lives each year. It really is a community service.”

She doesn’t know how to picture a Rose Parade without the spirit of volunteerism, Rountree-Brown further emphasized. “I think it would it be financially impossible to provide to the world,” she said. “It’s an indescribable feeling to stand back from something you have worked on all day or all year and know that you have had a part in building a parade that will be seen by millions of people all over the world. In the case of these young women, they will be able to point to a specific float and say, ‘I worked on that.’”

To volunteer for decorating floats or for more information, go online at http://www.tournamentofroses.com/events/floatdecorating.asp.