Mother’s Club raises money for Susan G. Komen foundation.
By: Jessica Beym
The Mothers’ Club annual Pound Auction is like a box of chocolates. The women never know what they’re going to get inside of the wrapped gift they’re bidding on.
It could, in fact, be a box of Belgium chocolates or it could be a bag of chicken feed, which Lisa Coniglione wound up taking home for $75 after she won the bid on Wednesday night.
At the annual auction, each woman brings in two identically wrapped gifts with about the same weight. Except one gift is a "real" gift, such a silver planter set with flowers, and the other is a joke gift such as a bag of mulch and a few weeds.
Despite the fact that Ms. Coniglione doesn’t have any chickens to feed, she said the $75, which was the highest bid of the night, was well worth the cause.
This year the Mothers’ Club auction raised more than $1,400 to be donated to the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation. The foundation, which began as a promise between sisters to raise awareness about breast cancer, is celebrating its 20th anniversary this year. May is also National Breast Cancer Awareness month.
Tara Guidi, the president of the Mothers’ Club, said that while this is the first time the club has donated to the foundation, they thought the foundation was a deserving one.
"We do have a couple of women in the Mothers’ Club who are battling breast cancer or who are breast cancer survivors," Ms. Guidi said.
Last year, the auction brought in $1,050, which was donated to Skeet’s Pantry and Cranbury School PTO. This year, more than 30 women attended the auction, which was held at Kelly Lehman’s home on Cranbury Neck Road. Jill Frost, the auctioneer, stood in front of the crowd of women and help up the matching items, occasionally giving a few hints before she started the bidding.
Each item was bid on separately, but then the women opened the wrapped gifts at the same time, which in most cases, brought a lot of laughs, Ms. Lehman said. Some items that were auctioned off were a martini set, a matching earrings and necklace set, glass serving dishes, or linen placemats. Some of the gag gifts were a bag of mulch, plastic place mats or a stinky old hat.
Ms. Lehman and Ms. Coniglione bid on the same set of items, which ended up being a box of perfumes and a bag of horse feed.
"It was the last item to be auctioned off, so people were really bidding high," Ms. Lehman said. "I got the good gift. But it was funny because one of them smelled really great and one of them smelled like livestock."

