The week before Christmas is one of my favorite times of the year at First Glance. Like I have said in previous blog post, holidays can be challenging for our students as some of them come from low income and broken families. The holiday season is for some of them a reminder of their constant battle and struggles. At FG, we make it our mission during the season to make the students feel loved and blessed while pointing them to Christ who loved us first. For many of our students, we are their family and main support system. So, it is important to us to celebrate with them! The week is filled with showering our students with blessings!
On Tuesday night, Ladies’ Night Out had our annual Christmas party. We were able to make them a nice Christmas dinner. We were able to the girls socks, scarves, hats, and gloves, which differently meets their needs. They were so excited and thankful for the gifts they received. We also played our annual musical chairs game and decorated cookies! It was a blast!
Our Teen/ Young Moms Program does an annual boutique every year where we collect used educational toys, clothes, blankets, and variety of other gift options to meet their needs. The moms then have the ability to use their points that they have been earning and saving to Christmas shop. For many of them, this is their only opportunity to get their children gifts. They then wrap the presents as a group.We also had a Tiny Glancers leader buy each of the students a present from their wish lists! It blessed me to be able to see the joy on their faces as opened gifts and as the teen moms were able to provide Christmas presents for their children in such a tangible way.
This year for our large Student Christmas party we did things differently. Noelle Beck, Executive Director of FG, is an amazing leader and visionary. She had the idea of having a very large and nice Christmas dinner/evening for our students. All the food was donated, and we were able to recruit over 100+ volunteers from different churches volunteer, so our regular leaders were able to sit down and enjoy dinner with the students. We invited all students that attend FG programming including our teen/young mom programming along with our young adults.
The students came rushing in the door and were greeted by leaders who lead them to tables. The girls were presented with flowers. We then enjoyed a family restaurant style dinner where the volunteers acted as waiters and waitresses. The girls that were sitting at my table were in awe! Noelle was able to talk to our students over dinner and explain to them why were doing this for them—because we loved them and wanted them to know the love of Christ. We then had Christmas karaoke, a dance party and had an inflatable set up for them to play on. Through the generosity of the community, we were able to give every student a $5 gift card to Subway and a candy bar.
It was truly an amazing night that couldn’t have been done without God’s hand and the vast amount of volunteers and generous donations that were made.
