Giving Tree

I don't usually talk about things I do outside of my family, but today I want to share with you a little about what I've been up to this crazy month of December.  A little background:  I'm Relief Society President in my ward.  For those of you that have no idea what I'm talking about, I am over the spiritual and temporal welfare of the 200+ women that are 18 and over in my church congregation (we refer to congregations as wards in the LDS church).

One of my responsibilities during the holidays is to oversee the Giving Tree.  I try to find out what families need help with for Christmas, and then we place tags on the tree for members of the ward to take and get things for these families.  It takes a lot of coordination, because we try to make the giving and receiving as anonymous as possible, but also because in our particular ward we have a lot of needs.  For those of you who are not familiar with the way Mormon congregations work, it's all by geographical boundaries.  You attend the ward where your home fits within the boundaries.  You can literally type your address in on lds.org and it tells you which meetinghouse you would attend.  I can travel anywhere in the world and easily look up where I would go to church.  It's kinda nifty.  Anyway, the boundaries in my particular ward include a section of downtown Columbus, and we happen to have a lot of people who struggle financially and are going through hard times.  A lot of families needed to be on the Giving Tree.  I also wanted to make sure that single parents and widows weren't forgotten about.  This meant the Giving Tree was quite a huge project to manage.

For the last week my house has looked like a Christmas explosion with gifts, stockings and gift cards all over the place.  Last night I emptied my house and we came to the church to make all of the fruit baskets and organize all of the gifts to be distributed.  It was quite a production.  We put it all together in just over an hour, and then sent out people to make deliveries.  After all was said and done we gave out 44 fruit baskets, 46 gift cards, 15 stockings and 18 gifts for children, and 5 turkey dinners.  The cellophane wrapping didn't hold as much fruit as we originally thought it would, so we also had a lot of extra fruit and nuts.  We ended up giving another 20 families the rest of the fruit. 

It was a completely chaotic evening, but it feels so good to have everything done and distributed.  My favorite part of this whole experience has been to witness the generosity and thoughtfulness of so many people.  The Giving Tree wouldn't have been possible without their willingness to give and to serve.  I love the holidays for this very reason.

Now that this particular endeavor is behind me, it's time to do some holiday baking.  :)  I'd say I was going to sleep for 24 hours straight, but since that's not an option I'll settle for baking.