Our thirteenth ‘Sparkle’ Event and Christmas Song, Joke and Poem Competition
Stefanie who lives with greater independence, enabled by ubu in the East Midlands sent us a fantastic video of the ‘Sparkling’ event she and her friends and neighbours put together for their local community.
“We talked about Christmas and what was important to us at this time of year. We want to be with our family and friends, have presents and eat a delicious Christmas dinner. But we know that some people don’t have any chance of enjoying these things. This can be one of the most difficult times of the year for some people.”
Stefanie and her friends point out that the homeless will still be homeless at Christmas. “They might not have food, clothes or anywhere to get a hot drink so we thought we’d like to help them. We did think about donating money to the various charities that help and where homeless people can get support. But after making a few enquiries and some patience we found a place where we would be able to be get involved, do something to help and find out what it can be like to be without a home at Christmas.”
They organised buying and preparing food and gifts for the homeless people in their area and then how to get these special packages and meals to them. “We wanted to make sure that on at least one night we could help to make sure that homeless people would get meal.”
“We got our ‘Sparkle’ event organised with a local school. They let us use their kitchen to prepare the meal. We decided to make a turkey stew and dumplings and chocolate sponge for dessert! So to get started we all went shopping for the ingredients and then made up some bags for them with some toiletries, warm socks and gloves and some treats as well as fruit and chocolate”.
Everyone really enjoyed working together as a team to make the meal and had a lot of fun together preparing. “We then had to move to the venue and had to be there early to set up and be sure that we were ready for 8.30 in the evening for when the homeless knew we would have food and drinks to share with them.”
“What we hadn’t realised was that we were going to be doing this all out in the cold! But it was just fine and we gave out all of the food. First of all the stew and dumplings and then the dessert and the bags with all the treats in them.”
“We spent time talking and chatting to the people who came along to enjoy the meal and helped some people to find warm coats from the donated clothes that we had available because it was very cold.”
“We all had a really good time and it helped all of us to realise that even though we were cold, we could return to our own warm homes. We feel really grateful for that because the homeless people we tried to bring some warming sparkle were still out in the cold.”
In Harrogate we got together for almost our last celebration before the Christmas break at the Hub. We sang “I wish it could be Christmas everyday” together and ate lovely food and had warm drinks. It felt fantastic to be together and enjoying each other’s company. Our Song, Joke and Poem competition entries helped to make us all feel so fortunate to have so much happiness around us this year.
