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Volunteers wrap it up again for kids
Volunteers complete another year of giving to needy kids
lIBERTY
Inside Church Hill United Methodist Church on Thursday, folding chairs ringed the spacious fellowship room — each sporting a small stack of brightly wrapped gifts.
Church member and Liberty resident Marlene Flickinger was, well, wrapping things up, packing rolls of wrapping paper on end in a box.
It was going on 1 p.m. The party the church hosts every year for community members to get together to wrap gifts for E.J. Blott Elementary School children who are in need would continue until 3 p.m., but it largely was over.
Only four or five volunteers remained from the 25 or so who’d shown up through the morning to help. On Friday, 51 families would be arriving throughout the day to pick up gifts for 115 children among them, also receiving gift cards for food from Giant Eagle.
For now, organizers and volunteers were taking a little breather.
Flickinger said she’s been working the wrapping party, and in fact, the whole Blott Kids Holiday Project including shopping and putting up trees with tags in locations throughout the township, for six years.
She started doing so, she said, at the request of church member Gretchen
Reed, a former teacher at the school. Reed started the project 30 years ago when she saw some of her own students going without gifts and even basic necessities at Christmas time.
“I look forward to it every year,” she said. “Because it does so much good for the community.”
She had started her day at 8:30 that morning, wrapping — “I have no idea, 35, 40, something like that” — gifts.
The day was still plenty young enough for her to go home and get started with her own Christmas gift wrapping.
“Absolutely not,” she said at the very suggestion.
She walked over to a table where Fran Pettit, one of the project organizers, waited with a cellophane and cardboard box with proud, bright letters announcing it contained a three-story playhouse.
“Marlene, this one still needs wrapped,” Pettit said.
Flickinger tucked the box under her arm and went off to oblige.
Along with Pettit, who is also Reed’s neighbor and has taken the helm since Reed can no longer participate, main organizers are Jan Ferry, Barb Gulgas and Sharon Wathen.
As they surveyed the result of the hard work by all the project volunteers such as Flickinger, they talked about how it started 30 years ago and how far it’s come.
“[Reed] noticed there were needy children who didn’t have mittens or hats,” said Gulgas. “Her adult Sunday School class here would buy gifts, and gradually, it grew.”
“When Gretchen started, there were two or three children,” said Ferry.
“As a young mother, she knew how difficult it was — they couldn’t afford it.”
Now, the entire community is represented in who buys gifts not only for the Blott kids, but for their siblings as well if they have them.
Church members buy clothes, and people pick tags off trees at locations throughout the township. They buy toys, games or books for an anonymous boy or girl in kindergarten through fourth grade. The trees are set up in early November.
This year’s locations included El Tapatio, Walmart, Jimmy’s, Denny’s, Great Clips, the Liberty branch of the Trumbull County Library, the church, Hairstyling Concepts in Hubbard Township, Temple El Emeth, West Fork Roadhouse, the Liberty Township Administration Building, and the Jewish Community Center, which puts out sharing baskets instead of a tree.
“It’s a lot of work,” said Gulgas. “But it’s a lot of fun too,” said Ferry.