Calvin's Annual Christmas Party

 This past Saturday, December 13th,   45 Calvin"ites" gathered together to celebrate Christmas a bit early. We've done this Party for many, many years, but it's always fun to prepare for it and watch people enjoying themselves.  

Enjoy the pics   

We start by decorating the fellowship hall.

The end result of the tables.  

All is done and ready for the guests.

I like lots of Candles. 

Coffee, cold punch, and hot apple cider.  

More Candles.  

Our first guests.  Whoot!! : ) 

People arrived between 6 and 6:30 pm. 

Gifts for the gift exchange.  

About to start.  

We started with a get to know you set of questions.  

And then it was time to eat. 

There's always lots to eat.  

After supper we read the Christmas Story and sang some caraols and then we played Christmas Pictionary.  The next set of pictures show the different tables drawing away :) 

Then it was dessert time.  

We ended with our gift exchange once again. 

All present (pun intended) had a great time, and we hope to see them, and others, again next year 

Helping out at the reSource Store

This past Tuesday, our youth in grades 6 - 12, as well as some parents, showed up to assist the reSource store once again.  This thrift store raises funds for various Christian Schools in the Ottawa area.  

This time around we spent about 1/2 our time moving boxes from one area of the store to a new area of the store that was just acquired.   Enjoy the pics : )

Soooooo, we started by taking all the Christmas decorations from this upper area.  We formed, more or less, an assembly line to minimize all the walking  between the two spaces.  

And so the movement of boxes begins down the stairs.  

 

At the bottom of the stairs people would take them and walk them to the other set of stairs.  

Colton is always having fun.  

Hmmmm, I hope he can see where he's going :) 

Hey Holden : ) 

Once at the other set of stairs up the boxes went with another group of people.  

They ended up in this beautiful new space that will, for now, be the Christmas sale centre, along with a reading nook.  It should be a cozy space.  

This took about 40 minutes, and it was rather warm that night, so it was time for a snack break.  

After the break we did our regular helping routine of finding unused hangers in the clothing section.  Maya and her sister Amelia made it into a competition, of course : ) 

We also sorted clothing.  

And cleaned up the receiving area, as there was literally no room to receive new donations.  

Holden seemed to adopt the grade 6 - 8's.   

They are waiting for something to do : ) 

Never a good idea. 

Thanks for supervising Holden  :  ) 

And soon it was 8:30 and we were ready to depart after being filled with sugar via the snacks : ) 

Thanks to all who helped make the move to the new space go much faster.  

I hear that the next time we come there will be Pizza!!!  

YES!! 

Until next time then. : ) 

The BIG GIVE at Calvin CRC

 Hello again to those who follow this blog : ) 

Another event we held just a bit ago at Calvin was 

THE BIG GIVE.  

https://thebiggive.ca/

The last one we held was back in June of 2022.  

We took a bit of a break, but came back this year with a scaled-down version.  

Below are some pics and videos of the morning. 

We held our BIG GIVE from 

10 a.m. to 1 p.m. on 

Saturday, June 7th.  

Set up started at 9 a.m.  ish. 

Lots of different tents to shelter us from the Sun. 

Our Prayer Tent. 

Several people just stopped by for prayer. We hope they were blessed.  

Soon to be the coffee/snack shelter

We also received some donations and placed them out for people to take for free, as everything offered that day was free.  : ) 

Our bike repair tent.  

A couple of pics of the overall area. 

The bike repair tent was consistently busy for the entire time. 

We held a free car wash as well.  

We cleaned over 30 cars.

  

We had live music.  Thanks for doing that Nisse. 

Cars just kept coming : ) 

Terkuma decided he wanted his bike cleaned as well. 

 : ) 

And we had kids enjoy making crafts.  

Somehow I forgot to get pictures of the lunch we served, which was hotdogs and veggies and juice boxes.   

All in all we served about 160 people for lunch and all who came we hope felt blessed. 

Below you can see two videos.  

The first is Albert riding a pretty cool bike that was fixed up. 

The second was just a panorama of the different things that were going on. 

Thanks again to alllll who helped out and made this event happen.