What do you have when you gather together 37 dozen tamales, a woman named Kathi Mendez dressed in a Santa suit, a six-foot tall elf named Lee Hill, 29 families and 57 children who need toys? The most joyous event of the holidays this season—the Toy Giveaway.
As I celebrate the start of the New Year this week and look back on the past year, my favorite moments of 2014 came this year at Christmas. Seeing the joy on the faces of the children at the Migrant Family Toy Giveaway brought me my greatest joy this season.
A big thank you goes to Bernadette Barrera, migrant education recruiter for the Gilroy Unified School District, who invited some of the most economically challenged children in our community to this benefit for which the Gilroy United Methodist Church collected toys, blankets and winter jackets.
These families live in a different kind of homelessness. They don’t own homes, yet these are some of the hardest-working families in Gilroy. They manage to find shelter wherever they can, whether it be a room in a house, an inexpensive motel room, a migrant camp, a converted garage, in vehicles or even a chicken coop behind a house. It is the unseen side of Gilroy for those who live right under our noses everyday.
For the first time, the Gilroy Girl Scouts volunteered at this event. A big thank you goes out to the young women of Troop No. 60493 for volunteering to help these children in need.
Many of these families have come here from indigenous villages in Mexico where neither English nor Spanish is spoken. Starvation and no help from the Mexican government have driven them to find work, and they have answered the call sent out by local farms for hard-working crews.
A Gilroy bakery called Del Sol on Westwood Drive donated several dozen Mexican pastries to the Christmas event for the families. An enterprising woman named Rosa who has formed her own company, Mi Dulce Compania, made 37 dozen handmade traditional tamales for the families in four different flavors.
Volunteers made dozens of home-baked cookies, including what turned out to be the kids’ favorite: specialty sugar cookies made by Jeremy Kirchner in colorful designs. Some of the indigenous parents who fled starvation in remote villages in the mountains of Mexico have never tasted homemade cookies of western European origin, so the meal provided a cross-cultural experience of sharing—as the Gilroy volunteers in turn tried the pork loin, cabbage and radish soup called pozole (made by Rosa Isela Moreno) and the delicious cinnamon hot chocolate known as champurrado (made by Lupe Rivera).
Thanks to Univision Radio San Francisco, which brought bags of food for each family, packaged festively in green and red paper, gift cards for necessary items, toys and the very popular DJ Capulina to entertain the kids.
Christopher and Gilroy High School students earned community service hours by volunteering at the event and local field workers worked side-by-side with them to give the children the best Christmas possible.
The event this year was dedicated to the memory of Barbara Gailey, a longtime Gilroy teacher who passed away Aug. 14. Mrs. Gailey always supported the Toy Giveaway, and her picture was put up on display at the event and the event opened with words of tribute to her. This year, realizing that she would most likely not be here by December, Mrs. Gailey donated a lovely black jacket and other items in advance, long before the event. I took the items to the party, where they were joyously received, and I could feel her smiling down from up above.
The Odd Fellows Gilroy Lodge No. 154 came through with an amazing donation of gift cards. Not to be outdone, the manager of Pacheco Pass Self-Storage stepped donated gift cards as well, which went to provide much-needed staples such as rice, beans, shampoo, laundry detergent and other necessary items many families do not have in the winter months as they arrive in the area for the next season of work.
Deaconess Kathy Kim from Morgan Hill—who serves in countries all over the world in a missionary capacity—provided yarn to many seniors in retirement homes, who knitted and crocheted warm scarves, hats, lap blankets, afghans, dresses and outfits throughout the year, and then donated them all to the families.
Thanks to the generosity of Products Plus, Inc., we had enough toys for every child—and even enough to give to other children for several other local families in need as they asked for help before Christmas.
A big thank you to all who contributed—including readers who contacted the Toy Giveaway planners through the Gilroy Dispatch—for all your contributions in making this holiday season one for all to remember.
Acts of kindness know no calendar. May the New Year remind us of the importance of living the Christmas Spirit not just Dec. 25, but each and every day.
To share your experiences of local acts of kindness, please contact me at
ka********@gm***.com
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