Brighten Your Day

Very close to my home there is a shelter for homeless teen girls, every year for the last four years, I have reached out to the community to buy gifts for the young ladies who will be spending Christmas day at the shelter.

I grew up in places like this, and I know from personal experience that Christmas can be the most painful time of year for homeless youth to be without family.

Once again this year's Christmas present drive has been an overwhelming success. I have spent the last two days wrapping, organizing and labelling all of the gifts, which has been a much needed distraction after some terrible news this week.

This year a whopping 140 very high quality gifts for the girls have been either donated, or purchased using almost $5000 raised mostly through a local community Facebook page. This includes 6 "stocking stuffer" bags with DOZENS of gifts and 6 "skin care and make up mega gift bags" FULL TO THE BRIM!

I have also included this year 8 presents for the staff of The Girls Refuge. Which are not mentioned in the card as I know at least a couple of them will see this

29 hand written cards were dropped into my mailbox, I read them all to make sure they were appropriate and I sure got quite teary there for a while... Such a beautiful and personal touch, I am so thankful, it's been rather difficult for me to be positive the last few days and I appreciate the help I have had with this task.

As usual, while I organize this, it is a fantastic and beautiful community effort. Local people looking out for young vulnerable women going through a very tough time in a local shelter most people don't even know is there. And while I may sound like a broken record when I say this, I think there is a fair chance we will be giving these young ladies (we will never meet) a big smile, (we will never see) on a day that would be most painful for them.

A big thank you to my local community. Thank you to people who purchased and dropped off physical gifts, thank you to every one who donated to the gift fund, and a special mention to a local hairdresser that has generously donated hair care sets two years in a row.

Big love, and thank you so much.

I will cart everything over in the next couple of days.