Lakeshore teen nears goal of 10,000 cards for seniors
Area libraries contributing hundreds of handmade cards from staff, clients
Ten-thousand handmade, one-ofa-kind cards.
The Lakeshore teen who set that high holiday goal to bring smiles to seniors in nursing homes has collected almost 7,000 Christmas cards and she carted off nine boxes of cards from Windsor libraries Tuesday morning.
“I’m just amazed with the Windsor library,” Emily Truman, who started the Holiday Happymail boxes in November, said Tuesday from the library’s central branch on Ouellette Avenue. “I just heard one of the boxes was so full that it actually fell apart because it was so stuffed with cards. I’m just so thrilled that I was able to get so many people in the community engaged and so many people into the libraries.”
The 16-year-old is optimistic she’ll reach her 10,000-card goal before Christmas and has already started handing out the cards to the sometimes lonely seniors at long-term care homes.
“There’s a lot of novelty in getting a handmade card and I think I’m really seeing that magic in how neat it is for someone to receive something that was handmade just for them,” Truman said of the big smiles she’s seeing as the cards are opened. “I’m willing to bet three months from now a lot of these will still be displayed.”
Before sorting and counting the cards she picked up Monday morning, she said 6,978 holiday cards had been made, including 1,582 collected from the Holiday Happymail boxes that were located at the Essex County library branches.
Many libraries had card-making stations for the campaign. Windsor libraries with 3-D printers helped people make cards that popped up to form a 3-D scene.
It’s so encouraging to see a young person with such a passion for helping others, said Windsor Public Library CEO Kitty Pope. She said the campaign gave library goers a chance to gather together as they made the cards.
“I wish my mom was alive. She would have loved one of these,” Pope said.
Although it may have seemed like a lot to ask people to create their own Christmas cards and print a kind message inside, it turned out it brought people together, whether it was in a library, in homes or in local schools. Truman said she’s amazed by the response.
Truman, who visits seniors in a nursing home once a week, wanted to encourage people to visit local seniors or make something special for them. She is still expecting to receive 11 boxes of cards from Toronto that she will hand out in Windsor-essex, and she’s still collecting cards made at local day cares or dropped off at Starbucks locations.
She intends to keep collecting birthday and other cards through the year for seniors. They can be mailed to the Stay Gold Society, P.O. Box 21015, Manning Road Post Office, Windsor, Ont., N8N 4S1. She’s looking for more volunteers to go to nursing homes. You can reach her at emily@staygoldsociety.org.
There were 40 Holiday Happymail
boxes in locations around Southwestern Ontario, Truman said. About 2,000 cards have already been collected and distributed in Hamilton, London and the York Region where volunteers there collected more than 1,000 cards for nursing homes just in the York Region, she said.
In London, volunteers Rosalyn Smith and Lauryn Richardson picked up cards from Starbucks and delivered them to the Mcgarrell Place Long Term Care Home, Kensington Village and Earls Court Village, and some schools and other volunteers in London made and delivered handcrafted cards, Truman said.