Recap: Wrapping presents for the less fortunate!

Last Friday I went to my first tweetup of 2010! (Which is sad since 2010 is almost over, LOL)

It was the Santa’s Anonymous Christmas Toy Wrapping Tweetup and I went with Mike, Jack, Fred and his friend Jolyn.

When I saw the event invitation circulating around Twitter the week before by Brittany LeBlanc (@britl), I knew that this was one I wanted to attend.

I’ve been wanting to head to a lot of different tweetups over the past year but either there were scheduling conflicts, it cost money, or I was just too lazy, it never happened. That, coupled with the fact that I’ve been feeling like I should give back to my community more because I really haven’t done much volunteering in a very long time meant that I really wanted to go to this tweetup!

Santas Anonymous is a charity which delivers new toys to 25,000 less fortunate children in Edmonton.



The warehouse full of toys! Edmontonians are so giving.

Mike and Jack were both wary of going because let’s face it, “let’s wrap toys for three hours” doesn’t sound that appealing, especially when the toys aren’t even for us. But I forced them to come and then I extended the invite to Fred and I think it’s safe to say we all had a great time and a big factor of that is wrapping the presents for the less fortunate kids in Edmonton really made us all feel good inside!

Mike, Jack and I were at one table and Fred and Jolyn were at another table.

Mike and Fred went “shopping” for the toys for Jack, Jolyn and I to wrap. We were aiming for specific age groups that night and at first it was hard finding toys suitable for 2 year old boys and especially hard to find toys suitable for 11-12 year old girls, but as the night progressed the “shoppers” got better at it and the wrappers got better at wrapping!

Not that I was bad at wrapping in the first place but I definitely progressed as the night went on.

Mike and Jack switched roles half way through as well, we found that Jack was better at finding toys for the kids. Near the end we had a lot of really great sets of toys. One kid is going to open up their gift on Christmas and find a kickass portable air hockey table! Another kid will find a sweet princesses-costume changing set.

I saw a few Twitter folks I recognized but the majority of attendees I had never seen or spoken to on Twitter! And given the nature of the event, where I was pretty much glued to my wrapping table for most of the night, I didn’t really get to know any new Tweeple either.

But all in all it was a fun event. The holiday music playing constantly in the background was an added perk and as I alluded to above, it is a really great feeling knowing that you’ve helped make someone’s Christmas!! Great tweetup!!

I also suggested that this week’s NAIT NewsWatch anchors do some wrapping for Santa’s Anonymous for the “helping out in the community” story that we do for the weekly shows! :O)

If you want to volunteer or donate, get more information at the
Santa’s Anonymous Official Website!!

Here’s Brit’s recap on the event:
Edmonton tweeters wrap for Santa’s Anonymous!

And here’s a link to my Flickr set on the event for more photos!
Linda’s Flickr (that I’m going to try to use more!)

(Also thanks to Brittany for organizing and for leading us into the warehouse when we arrived! We were looking pretty lost and thought the address seemed fake, LOL – come on, “Santas Warehouse” 12345 121 Street? Ha ha!)

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