As she begins her answer, she says she’s not sure if she’ll be able to get through it without crying.
The speaker is Bev Montgomery, one of the many volunteers with the North Shore Christmas Bureau, and she is describing what it feels like to do her job. She is one of the volunteers tasked with interviewing people that come into the Bureau looking for a little Christmas cheer to share with their families. When the interview process is over, deserving families walk out of the building with coats to keep them warm, toiletries to keep them clean and, of course, gifts to fill the empty spaces under the tree. Many families leave crying tears of joy at the mini miracle that has saved Christmas.
The biggest gift, however, is not one that is wrapped in tinsel, says Montgomery, but rather the feeling that the volunteers get from those special moments.
“We give gifts in the sense of providing for these families,” she says. “But I think the biggest gift is to us, because if you've given from your heart without expectation, it is the greatest gift that you can give to anybody, especially to yourself. So to me, I don't know that you would ever experience that unless you've done it once or twice in your life. Most people will always have – ‘you do a job, you get paid.’ But when you do something like this without expectation – what you get in return, there's nothing like it.”
And she was right – there’s no stopping the tears at this point. Montgomery and fellow volunteer Diane Brassington shared their stories during a recent afternoon at the Christmas Bureau’s bustling office inside the old Delbrook rec centre. The numbers put up by the Bureau, which is run by Family Services of the North Shore, are impressive: in 2018 there were 207 volunteers who worked 3,603 volunteer hours while supporting more than 1,900 clients, delivering 200 Christmas hampers and 1,000 personal hygiene packages and providing new toys for 712 children. This year, the goal is to do more.
Montgomery and Brassington are two of the lucky volunteers whose job it is to meet with the families when they arrive at the Bureau, interview them, get to know their needs and get the ball rolling towards granting their Christmas dreams. Much of what they do is administrative – gathering financial information, collecting contact information and family identification details – but there is one question they ask which often gets a deeply touching response.
It’s a question that any good news reporter knows well: is there anything else you’d like to add?
That question has a great chance of producing the best, most heartfelt comment from the person you are interviewing. And it’s a question, it seems, that makes incredible connections between Christmas Bureau volunteers and the families they meet.
“You ask them if there's anything else you'd like to say, and that's when the work starts,” says Montgomery. “And that's the touching part because they're given an opportunity to basically say, yeah, this is what I love to do with my family. I'm not just in here asking for freebies, this is who we are.”
There’s one reply that the volunteers hear surprisingly often, says Montgomery.
“The one thing that gets me all the time is when they say, ‘One day I want to be on the other side of this. I want to give back.’ That is a comment that comes out quite a bit.”
The job is an emotional one for Brassington as well.
“Always heartwarming, sometimes heartbreaking,” she says, adding that there’s much more to the connections made at the Christmas Bureau than simply giving out gifts. “I think the nice part about the Christmas Bureau is not only do we offer everything you see in here and the hampers, but we get to connect (clients) to other organizations and services in the community, which is really helpful to a lot of people.”
Brassington relates the story of meeting with a family earlier this year and, during the interview process, discovering that they did not have any furniture in their home.
“They were sleeping literally on the floor,” she says. Through her Christmas Bureau contacts she connected the family with a local charity that set them up with beds.
New to the program this year, every family member who needs a warm winter coat can select one from the gently used offerings stored right there at the Christmas Bureau office. Toiletry bags are also available on site, life essentials that the volunteers have now separated from the toys and gifts and hampers that families get at Christmastime. It’s all part of the Bureau’s goal of making this a time of year that is a joyous one, not a stressful one, for all North Shore families.
“We all love Christmas, we all love to give, and we just want to make sure that they feel that they leave here knowing that there's a community service like the Christmas Bureau that provides that compassion without judgment,” says Montgomery. “I would say the majority of people walk out of here a lot happier than when they walk in. We get a lot of hugs.”
Click here for more information about accessing the services offered by the Christmas Bureau or offering support for the program through donations or volunteering.
