Campus group collects Christmas gifts for needy

By Julie Hirshan | gargoyle@flagler.edu

This holiday season, Flagler College students are helping to bring joy to children and families around the world.

Student groups give back to the community all year long, and certainly don’t stop as the end of the semester approaches. Some religious groups on campus are participating in programs especially geared towards Christmastime.

Campus Crusade for Christ Co-President Halie Trammell says that 30 students from her group participated in Operation Christmas Child.

Operation Christmas Child is an international effort to provide children with toys during the Christmas season. Samaritan’s Purse, an international relief organization, collects and distributes the toys in shoe boxes to children around the world. To fill a shoe box, the donor selects an age range, two to four, five to nine, or 10 to 14 years old, and then decides if the toys will be for a boy or a girl.

“We collected about 15 boxes. Our group doubled up, and so two people shopped and paid for one box,” Trammell says.

The Intervarsity Christian Fellowship is helping families in this country in a different way.

“We are taking a week long relief trip to Mississippi right after exams in order to finish up houses that were affected by Hurricane Katrina and other hurricanes that have devastated the Gulf Coast since 2005 so that families may move back into them for the holidays,” says Sara Mattheus, one of the group’s student leaders.