This year, the Niverville United Church partnered with Home Instead Senior Care to introduce Be a Santa to a Senior, a gift-giving program aimed at supplying Christmas presents to our senior residents who might otherwise not receive gifts.

As Christmas approaches, the church’s pastoral care team has announced that the program was a great success, with just under 100 seniors in the Niverville area being provided with gifts.

The town’s Service to Seniors coordinator, along with the recreation director for the Heritage Life Personal Care Home, provided names of older members of the community who might otherwise not receive a Christmas Gift this year, would be alone at Christmas, or had suffered a recent hardship. Further names were also submitted by the United Church congregation and members of the community at large.

Each recipient’s name was written on a tag along with a wish list of items particular to them. The nametags were then hung on a Christmas tree, first at the Heritage Centre and later at Niverville Bigway. All the tags were picked up, and gifts were purchased, wrapped, and returned to the United Church.

“A big thank you to Damien Gagne and Angela Leonard from Service to Seniors Niverville for delivering the gifts and visiting with the recipients,” says Cathy Neyedley of the United Church pastoral care team. “Gifts were wrapped with care and several gift-givers expressed their enjoyment in shopping for the person they had chosen.”

Some members of the community still wanted to contribute despite having missed the opportunity to pick a name. Their contributions therefore took the form of cash donations, crocheted blankets, hats, mitts, scarfs, diabetic socks, candies, and hygiene products. These items were added to many of the gifts.

The program was such a success that the pastoral care team, which includes Cathy Neyedley, Ellen Gaudry, Clare McClarty, Joan Rempel, Betty Koop, and Val Neyedley,  looks forward to running it again next Christmas.