At work every year, our combined department of about eleven or so people usually decide to forego Christmas gifts to one another and instead donate that money to a worthy cause. The cause is Christmas Angels, a program where needy children are put on a list and names are assigned to those who want to give. Our group usually gets two children in the same family to contribute to.
Two of the women in our department are the focal people - getting everyone involved and collecting our donations. The donations are anonymous - just an envelope that they keep and we can put in whatever cash we like. The money is gathered over a week's time. Then the fun starts.
With each angel/name comes information about that child. Things like age, clothing sizes, interests or wish-list types of toys. The women (and whoever else wants to help) then go out and shop for your children - to get gifts for them. They usually try to get at least one full outfit of clothing as well as some toys for each of the kids. Then, they wrap up the gifts and drop them off at the collection point who, in turn, makes sure the gifts get to the kids for Christmas. The kids just know they have some 'angels' that were watching over them this year.
I've been here for three holidays now, and I think it is a neat thing to do. Often it is a much better use of the money rather than us getting each other little knick-knack type gifts. This way the money can go to some good use - helping make the holidays a little brighter for a few children in need.
Cool beans, Martin! Neat idea.
ReplyDeleteWe have a program like this through our church. It's fun to help out some kids who otherwise wouldn't have Christams, which is just too sad for words.
Halloween, I went down to Lincoln Park Zoo to hand out treats to inner city kids. Thirty thousand showed up.
Thirty. Thousand.
Luckily, not all of them made it to Bear Country, where the ND Club was handing out pudding cups and go-gurts (hey, we got em donated, so what are you gonna do?). :)