Every year, St Joseph’s SVP Conference in Birtley organise their own Christmas Appeal and for Christmas 2024 they worked with the local Infant and Junior schools and local organisations to provide Christmas hampers and toys for struggling families. The appeal got off to a great start when, following a pulpit appeal at a Saturday evening Mass, the wonderful parishioners of St Joseph’s proved their usual generous selves by filling the conference collection boxes. The conference was also able to arrange discounts with the local butcher and the local supermarket, Morrisons, which considerably reduced expenses.
The previous year’s appeal had proved labour intensive and included ‘follow the leader’ trains of trolleys navigating the supermarket to fill the trolleys with groceries and also demanded much from very helpful supermarket staff, who made up the hampers as more trolley loads were collected. One member of staff even suffered a dislocated shoulder after moving heavy packages around!
Learning from this experience, one of the wives of a conference member had the bright idea of dragging the SVP conference into the 21st century by encouraging them to use ‘Click and Collect’! This transformed the process as the items required for Christmas 2024 could be purchased gradually over time and stored at members’ homes. The Christmas hampers were then made up at St Joseph’s Presbytery over the weekends of the 2nd and 3rd Sundays of Advent by the conference.
Toys were also required and the connection the conference has with the Embells CIC Community Project (based in a fitness studio in East Gateshead) proved invaluable. Emma Bell, the project founder and member of the St Joseph SVP conference, was able to organise and provide all the presents required. These were then wrapped by SVP members over the weekend of Gaudete Sunday.
As you can imagine, the hampers and presents were gratefully received by the families, who we hope found Christmas joy in both the receiving of the gifts and in the Christmas season itself.
St Joseph conference wish to thank Morrisons in Birtley, Martin Baxter the butcher, also in Birtley, and especially the parishioners at St Joseph’s for their wonderful help with the appeal. The conference also wishes to remember former SVP member, Elaine Hannon. Elaine was the driving force behind the 2023 Christmas appeal, taking pole position in the member trolley dash around Morrisons that year. Elaine sadly passed away on 4 August 2024. “Gone, but never forgotten”.
