And so it begins…..

As some of you may remember, I’ve been volunteering for a kids charity at Christmas for the last few years and the campaign officially kicks off tomorrow. This year is a little more daunting as the chap who used to organise the ‘warehouse’ retired earlier this year and I’m apparently now the most experienced person. They’ve even found funding this year to pay me - woohoo - but that’s not why I do it, it’s just good to give something back.

Today the floor in the unit we’re using as charity HQ this year was finally dry and we were able to start getting organised. we should have volunteers in tomorrow but we’ve put them off till Tuesday to give us time to get organised tomorrow. We need to put up signs to mark out the different age groups and tape round the areas so that we’re staying Covid friendly. The agencies (social care, after school clubs, community groups and teachers etc) put in applications on behalf of the individual children they represent split by gender and age group and we try to fulfill those orders based on the gifts donated or purchased by cash donations. We are in the fortunate position that we had a reasonable amount of gifts donated late in the campaign last year so were kept to be used this year, so we are going to be ready to hit the ground running. The general public are very generous and there’s a good number of corporate sponsors too which helps. So far we’ve had applications in for over 10000 children and that number will rise.

When I got home, I took over the ironing from Mr PHL so he had a chance to relax after looking after Phin all day before we enjoyed a nice Chinese takeaway for dinner.

Thank you for your lovely comments and stars.