This Advent and Christmas we will be running two ‘schemes’ to help our clients and those on the ‘borderline’ of needing our help to have a happier Christmas: Reverse Advent Calendars and Christmas Parcels. We hope many individuals, families, groups and churches will help with one of these.
Reverse Advent Calendars seem to be catching on for many charities, especially Foodbanks. The concept is very simple: you download the ‘Advent Calendar’ the Foodbank publishes, put the item of food or toiletries given for each day into a box or strong bag for each day of Advent, and take it to your local Foodbank on Christmas Eve for them to use for Christmas parcels. The only snag is, Christmas Eve is far too late for us to use what you collect for Christmas! (And we are not actually open on Christmas Eve, or until the New Year; this year we will be closing on Friday 20th December until Friday 3rd January).
So if you would like to do a Reverse Advent Calendar for Brecon Foodbank, we suggest that you do it in one of the following ways:
– Instead of doing it in December, do it in November and bring it to us at the end of the month.
– Do it from about 10th November and bring us what you collect by the end of the first week in December.
– If you want to do it for Advent, just collect the sort of items we put in a ‘normal’ parcel (rather than a Christmas one) and bring us what you collect in the New Year.
– Or, as we are in fact well-stocked after people’s generosity at Harvest, wait and do it in Lent for Easter instead!
Whichever you decide to do, we will be extremely grateful!
Christmas Parcels. Rather than us packing Christmas parcels for our clients, we allocate you an individual, couple or family/household and you provide the Christmas parcel. You may wish to do this as an individual, a family, with friends, in a group, in a church…. it’s up to you! And you may wish to do more than one parcel!
We provide you with some guidance about what to pack, but there is also some flexibility for you. Doing the parcels this way, more perishable items than usual can be given, such as fresh fruit and vegetables, chilled products that will be all right out of the fridge for a few hours, and even a token for Christmas meat that can be taken to a local butcher, or local supermarket tokens that can be used for Christmas shopping. You will also be told the age and gender of the recipients to enable you to give appropriate gifts, and also of any dietary preferences, allergies etc.
Parcels will need to be brought to us on the morning of 20th December and our agencies will then collect them the same day to give to their clients.
If you would like to pack a Christmas parcel, please email us on [email protected] and we will get back to you with more details.