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For the past six years, the Rotary Club of Santa has turned our Parish Hall into a Christmas party for 150 children. Sadly for reasons of privacy I couldn't get a mass picture of the children, but I'm still working on it. The picture above is of the High School Youth of the Rotaract Club who help out, and the picture on the left is of one of the children as she was talking with Santa.

The Club feeds the children and gives them a bag of toys. And best of all (if you look to the left of the left hand picture) each one of the children is given a brand new coat specifically in their size and (because of the way the coats are purchased) is completely unique. No two coats are alike.

We have allowed the Rotary Club of Santa Clara to use our facility because it meets our Mission Statement of doing things in collaboration with the community.

These efforts on our part give us several things, for example, we are mentioned in the first paragraph of the newspaper article: "Playing the role of Santa for over 150 underprivileged elementary school children, members of the Santa Clara Rotary Club widened the smiles of needy Santa Clara children recently at Resurrection Lutheran Church."

Dan Holder of Holder's Country Inn, a member of the Rotary Club, provides the food for the children. He generally has left-overs and has offered them to us. This is the first year that we actually took him up on his offer, and we had spaghetti and meatballs for our greening of the Church for Christmas.

You can feel as if you are a part of this effort to give 150 children of the community of Santa Clara some presents and a new coat. The Rotary Club received the following which was passed on to me: "I want you to know how grateful I am that my daughter was able to go to the Christmas lunch yesterday and receive presents and a jacket. My company closed a year ago and my husband is disabled so we don't have much money for Christmas this year and we have six kids and one grandchild. You made her Christmas a lot more special this year!!! Thank you so very, very much."

We do what we can with the limited talent we have.

Soli Deo Gloria