Snohomish County NewsDrama club presents
“A Christmas Carol”
Doug Ramsay photo
In the role of Ebenezer Scrooge, Jacob Espy performs in the Snohomish High School drama club’s adaptation of “A Christmas Carol” Dec.12. The play is directed by student director Cecelia Proffit. There are four performances left Dec. 17, 18 and 19 at 7 p.m. and a 2 p.m. matinee Dec. 19. The show costs $10 for adults and students without ASB cards, $7 for children and students with ASB cards. The show is at Snohomish High School.
Students fill cancer-care kits
Doug Ramsay photo
Emerson Elementary third-grader Rainey Gatnon, 8, reaches for a pillow to place in a cancer-care kit that she was putting together along with other Emerson students Dec. 9. With donated items, such as pillows, blankets, hats and snack foods, each student put together a boxed kit that will be given to patients at the Everett Cancer Partnership. The students also decorated each box with art and wrote a positive message or poem of encouragement. The hour long event resulted in 110 kits being made.
Doug Ramsay photo
Barbara Earl and family sit down for Thanksgiving dinner in their Everett home.
Tradition helps those in need
Each year, family buys gifts for community members
EVERETT - Barbara Earl’s family has holiday traditions like any other family, just with a twist. They spend the holiday season buying and putting together presents, but when Christmas Day comes, they give their gifts to people they’ve never met.
Earl’s family — including her husband, five children, their children’s spouses and one grandchild — give to needy families through the food basket program run by Volunteers of America, who run the food bank in Everett and supply food banks across the county.
“We’re not big gift givers,” Earl said. “If we want something, we just go get it anyway. And when we do give gifts, we just give something silly. We kept saying, ‘We need to do something for someone else.’”
As chair of the Volunteers of America board of directors, Earl had the idea to enroll the family in the food basket program. For the last five years, family members have chosen from a list of food bank clients, many of whom are seniors, single parents or people with disabilities, and bought them a holiday meal and presents.
“My family gets a big kick out of it,” she said. “It’s just been a fun tradition in our family, to give to someone else.”
As the economy continues to struggle, families asking for food baskets through Volunteers of America has risen about 15 percent in 2009, Earl said.
“This year, the need is much bigger than it has been,” Earl said.
Last year, the program matched 1,400 needy families with gift basket donors. This year, more than 1,900 families signed up, many of whom will go on a waiting list until the food bank can find donors.
And that’s on top of the more than 3,000 families who come every month. Earl said when she stopped by the Everett Food Bank recently it was so crowded she could hardly walk through to get to her meeting.
“Anything we can do is so helpful,” Earl said. “And it’s never enough. That’s for sure.”
Everyone in Earl’s family participates in making gift baskets, even her grandson, who picks out gifts for children. In each gift basket, they include nonperishable foods, gift certificates for fresh foods like meat and fruit, gifts for the kids and one present for the children to give their mother.
Each family outlines in their application what gifts they would like, and Earl says she’s always struck by how basic their requests are. One year, a mother asked for a shower curtain. Children she has bought for asked for pajamas, puzzles and books.
“They are such basic items,” she said. “It just makes your heart hurt to think a child needs things like that.”
Earl admits her family’s holiday traditions may be unconventional. “We have a lot of fun with things that other people wouldn’t,” she said.
But Earl said she values the opportunity her family takes every year to give to those in need.
“It makes it much more meaningful,” she said.
By LINDSAY TOLER
Published Dec. 16, 2009
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