From the Chaplain

Our Christmas Giving This Year                                                       

Like many things that have been affected this year, we have had to change our usual process and delivery point for our traditional Christmas present drive. In the past we have donated our gifts to Anglicare but due to certain protocols we can’t do that this year. However, we are able to give our gifts to the St Vincent de Paul Support Centre located in Redfern and they will distribute our gifts to needy families within the area. Every student in the school is asked to contribute towards providing a Christmas gift for a child of a certain age group which will be collected at our School Christmas Service on Wednesday 1st December. This always brings a lot of joy to the children as well as the parents. As you are probably aware, the number families doing it tough for a variety of reasons has increased due to the pandemic. Some parents feel ashamed that they cannot provide a gift for their children due to their circumstances and our donations help them to have something to celebrate during Christmas.  Form and class teachers will help the students to plan and prepare for this activity over the next couple of weeks. We would like to have the gifts by Monday 29 November.

I have been speaking to a number of agencies recently about what they would prefer in terms of donations for Christmas and a number of them have asked if people could provide gift cards for those in need. One of those agencies is Barnardos Australia. They work with children and families dealing with the issue of out of home care and have had a special request for children in their older teens. This is part of a message I received from them:

“This year we required 1,500 gift cards for older children in our care. We would like to call on our appeal supporters to collect gift cards and send into Barnardos Head Office, attn: Annalise Wild, 60-64 Bay St, Ultimo NSW 2007, up until Friday 10 Dec.  Gift cards suitable for this particular age group include: JB HIFI, Rebel, Kmart, Target, Events Cinema, EB Games, Apple. We ask that gift cards are a minimum of $30.”

Garry Lee-Lindsay
School Chaplain