Santa's little helpers

POLSON — Santa’s elves never worked so hard.

With less than one week to go until Christmas, big-hearted Share the Spirit (STS) volunteers are stepping up once again to ensure the holiday is bright for all of Lake County’s children.

For 13 years, STS has been helping struggling families with toys, clothes and gifts. First, parents submit an application with details about their children and two wishes, aside from toys, for each. Those requests are put on tags that are attached to small trees and distributed to local businesses. Then, local residents pick up tags and shop for individual children, bringing the gifts to the STS headquarters where volunteers check to see the presents are age-appropriate and fairly distributed within each family, sometimes supplementing the shopper’s purchases with other donated items collected throughout the year.

Last year, Lake County’s Share the Spirit helped 1,300 kids receive Christmas gifts. That number is quite the jump up from the organization’s first year when only 350 children were helped.

“When we first started in 1998, there were about five organizations doing the same thing and it wasn’t very effective,” organizer Toni Young said. “We’ve tried to combine all of the holiday assistance programs.”

Part of the reason Young and her team of dedicated helpers are able to join so many efforts together and reach so many families effectively is that they utilize a computer program to check for duplicate applications.

“It’s a labor of love,” said Nancy Hines, a volunteer whose job it is to type each family into the system.

Hines has spent countless hours logging STS recipients into the computer in the last few weeks. Beyond that, it’s no easy task to collect, then organize thousands of donated gifts.

“We’re trying to make heads or tails of what we have here,” Young said with boxes of toys and books piled around her.

“Donations are always the biggest challenge,” Young said. “With the economy the way it is, the need is so much greater now.”

Gifts can vary from clothes to the more traditional books, dolls and games. Even essentials like grocery gift certificates, soaps, shampoos and dental care products have been collected or purchased at cost from generous local merchants.

“The kids are asking for very simple things, bedding, coats — nothing extravagant,” Young said. “We find a home for everything.”

The vast majority of Share the Spirit toys come from the Marine Corps Reserve Toys for Tots campaign, which operates all year, and had been stored in an airport hangar in Ronan before volunteers moved them to the STS headquarters in the former DRS building on South Hills Drive in Polson. The Polson PEO (Philanthropic Educational Organization) organized a donation of dolls and several other community service groups donated cash to the cause.

Several schools, as well as the Lake County Sheriff’s Office, have taken on the task of shopping for gifts in recent years.

Doves with Wings, a service club from St. Ignatius Middle School, raises money to buy gifts for children by crafting, then selling, yule logs, reindeer knickknacks and the big seller, holiday wreaths.

“When you first make them it takes about five to 10 minutes, but it gets easier,” sixth grader Shade Stevens said of making the wreathes. “It makes me happy to do it because it makes the kids happy.”

One of the students, Kanyon Stevens, actually went door-to-door around St. Ignatius at the last minute in order to raise an extra $50 to help one more child before the group went shopping at Walmart on Friday.

“I love to do this,” he said of the effort.

For Young, she’s always amazed at how many people move to this community and don’t know what Share the Spirit is.

“There are so many families that don’t understand it’s completely free, and if they need help, we’re here to help them,” she said.

While the deadline for completed applications was Dec. 5, Santa’s headquarters are open from noon to 5:30 p.m. every day through Thursday, Dec. 22. Donations for next year can be mailed to Share the Spirit, P.O. Box 1341, Polson, MT 59860.