Christmas: a holiday synonymous with family, food, gifts and fun. We look forward to Christmas and some even start celebrating the festive season weeks in advance; planning Christmas lunch, buying presents for those close to us, shopping for the perfect Christmas outfit and planning holidays with family.
However, many children come from homes that can’t afford to feed them, let alone buy them a Christmas gift, so we at Paarl Media, with the encouragement of Sonet Anema, decided to make a difference by taking part in the Christmas Shoebox Project.
How it works: Each institution has a project leader who is responsible for contacting the institution and getting the details of the children and then assigning them to special angels who then make up a shoebox filled with the required goodies.
The project leaders are then responsible for ensuring that all the promised shoeboxes are collected/ delivered and then it goes through a process of quality control in order to ensure that there are no unsuitable, harmful or sub-standard boxes. Once boxes were given the go ahead, they were sent to the relevant schools.
Volunteers were given the age and gender of their child and were then asked to fill a box with:
- Babies – Toiletries, Clothing, Towel, Blanket, Soft Toy, Rattle, Developmental toys.
- Girls (Under 12) – Toiletries, Clothing, Toys, Costume Jewellery, Hair Accessories, Crayons, Towel, Stationery, Sweets.
- Girls (Over 12) – Toiletries, Clothing, CD’s, Costume Jewellery, Hair Accessories, Stationery, Diary, Towel, Calculator, Sweets.
- Boys (Under 12) – Toiletries, Clothing, Toys, Crayons, Towel, Stationery, Sweets.
- Boys (Over 12) – Toiletries, Clothing, CD’s, Stationery, Diary, Towel, Calculator, Sweets.
Through the help and support of Paarl Media’s caring and generous staff, we were able to put smiles on the faces of more than a 100 children.
A big thank you to all those who helped make a difference and this year we hope to make an even bigger difference!
