Christmas 2013 was the focus of the staff at Gethsemane and many of our volunteers for months as we began planning for it way back in July.
Lists of names had to be established for the various Boarding Houses and aged care institutions as well as appropriate information to ensure that the right gifts could be obtained for each person.
Schools, groups and individual donors had to be checked to ensure that the core help was available and that the request for help could focus on the specific areas of need.
In various settings, practical gifts were assigned to each person as well as some personal items which were all placed in appropriate containers for delivery. Organisation and storage is often a challenge and the garage at Gethsemane has been permanently restructured for this purpose.
These gifts had to be organised by the end of November to allow time for us to work on the food hampers. Both gifts and food hampers had to ready for delivery to nearly 1100 recipients prior to Christmas.
