Each year our church hosts a Salvation Army Angel Tree. This year our tree had 132 angels and church members picked their angels very quickly. In fact I didn’t even get a chance to choose one this time! Instead I volunteered to help sort and transport all of the wrapped gifts to the Salvation Army depot.
I met with the other members of our missions committee last Friday. It was a joy to see all of the gifts that had been brought for the kids. The church office was overflowing with gifts and many more were in the sanctuary beneath our main Christmas tree.
Mike, who has organized the Angel Tree project for several years, had his clipboard in hand checking off names and gifts to make sure that all of the angel sponsors had brought their gifts in. I started calling out the angel numbers from the tags on the presents and he would check them off. This made the checking process go pretty quickly.
At one point our chruch’s grand pipe organ which was just a few feet away, suddenly started playing. That startled us to say the least and I had to yell for awhile to be heard over it. That organ can be very LOUD, especially as in this instance when our organist Kiyo and his wife Chiemi are both playing. Of course when they stopped playing I was still yelling for a moment.
As I was checking the packages I noticed how some of the children would be getting several presents from their angel sponsor. I imagined the children’s faces as they open the gifts on Christmas morning.
Troy and Kyle started loading up the packages that had been checked off into the trailer. When all the packages were accounted for I joined them in finishing up. We drove over to the warehouse that was housing all of the Salvation Army gifts and unloaded them. Now those gifts, lovingly selected and wrapped, along with all the other special presents await delivery to the little angels.
Spending just a couple of hours on the Angel Tree really helped me get into the Christmas spirit!
This post is part of the Bloggers Unite project.
