Staff Writer
Giving can oftentimes be the best gift of all during the holiday season. Multiple homerooms at our school chose to raise funds for an amazing cause, the New Hope-Solebury Adopt-a-Child event, which involves homerooms in grades 9-12 raising money, selecting a child and their wishlist (or a senior citizen!), and sending a select few individuals to retrieve what the child asked for within the class’ budget. This year was extremely successful, all thanks to the generous donations of homeroom students, New Hope citizens, homeroom students who shopped for the event, and of course all of the students and administrators involved in Key Club who made this year’s event possible. A total of two hundred and thirty eight children’s lists were adopted this year, along with thirty-one senior citizen lists getting adopted. Each one of the homerooms that participated made an effort to ensure that their adopted children or seniors had the best Christmas they possibly could.
I was a part of a group that shopped for this incredible event, and my group and I decided to do all of our shopping at Target, and due to the great generosity of my classmates, the two items on the list that I found most important being a winter jacket and snow pants were quickly purchased. We supplied a brand name jacket by Champion, seeing as it was the warmest thing we could find, along with a set of snow pants on the same brand. We proceeded to buy the girl we were shopping for plenty of clothes according to the things she said she liked in her description on her list. We added some personality to the gifts, with some unicorn themed pajamas and clothes after we were told that she liked,”anything with unicorns.” We had a bit of a hard time managing to make up an entire new bedspread set appropriate for a little girl within our budget, while still getting the rest of our list. We ended up at checkout with plenty of outfits, board games, a watch, a jacket and snowpants, a brand new bedspread, and more, completing her entire list. After the cashier recounted the cash we gave her about three times, we ended up being a dollar under budget.
The shopping experience was a ton of fun and made each of us very excited and glad to have not only donated but participated in selecting what a little girl gets for Christmas and helping an underprivileged family. The last steps of the Adopt-A-Child donation process was now the gift drop off. Thanks to teachers and administrators running the event as well as the amazing Key Club volunteers or “elves.”
The Gift Drop-off was a stress free and simple process. Students who did the shopping simply had to walk into the school on Dec. 12, 2018, check with Ms. Schwander or another teacher and explain who their homeroom teacher was, and hand in a garbage bag filled with goodies for the child or senior citizen that they shopped for. The volunteers would then take everything from there, helping to carry gifts from cars to the check-in, as well as bagging and packaging gifts to carry to trucks. We hope that each and every of the two-hundred sixty-nine kids and senior citizens are happy with their gifts, and a big thanks to everyone who shopped, donated, or volunteered to make this event possible! Many members in our school and community have helped with this event and it had a very successful turn out!
