MONROE — After decades of working to ensure that members of the community have a happy holiday season, two leaders of the Monroe Woman’s Club Christmas Stocking project are handing over the reins to the next generation of coordinators.
This year, Jennifer Spielman is mentoring Mary Schmidt to be the program’s next food box coordinator, and Kathy Reffue is passing the treasurer and fundraising coordinator lead over to Monica Schneider and Jenni Coplien.
Spielman has been heading the food box efforts since the 1980s, when the Christmas Stocking project expanded to the point where more volunteers were needed, she said.
She thought, “‘I could order the food,’” she said, so she volunteered for the position.
“Little did I know there was more involved to it than just putting in an order,” she chuckled.
From doing that, to rounding up enough boxes to hold the edible contributions, to getting the word out about the need for people to pack and deliver the boxes in pre-COVID times, Spielman took on numerous annual responsibilities.
Food purchased and laid out, helping hands of all ages would show up year after year to get everything assembled into hundreds of boxes. The next morning, bright and early, more volunteers would show up at around 6:30 a.m. with smiling faces to pick up boxes to deliver — many before they headed off to a full day of work.
“The spirit is amazing,” Spielman said. “Everyone is … happy. They are coming together, which to me is Monroe. It’s a community that comes together to look after their own.”
The holiday meal is, of course, only a part of the traditional holiday celebration that the Christmas Stocking works with. To help local parents put presents under the tree, for roughly two decades pre-COVID, Reffue made sure that the numbers all lined up between what the project’s volunteer shoppers bought for participants and what stores billed the group.
Packets mailed to each of the roughly 200-250 annual shoppers gave them not just the information they needed to head off to the stores to start buying items for those receiving assistance, but also an envelope addressed to Reffue to submit their receipts at the end.
Reffue then took on the times-taking task of making sure everything lined up between the receipts, the bills from the stores and the families’ coupons for the program.
“By Christmas, everybody else (coordinating the Stocking program) was done, but I wasn’t because our bills didn’t quit coming in … (until) the first part of February,” she said, so her job went well into that month.
Knowing that they were helping make the season brighter for local families made all the hours she put in worthwhile, though, said Reffue, who was formerly a shopper herself.
In that role, she saw firsthand how appreciative families are for the service, she said.
Leaving the coordinator position “is kind of bittersweet, in a way,” she said. “...It’s time for maybe some younger people to get in there a little bit, although I kind of do miss it.”
Spielman and Reffue have both helped the Christmas Stocking navigate the changes brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic.
The program has “really evolved a lot,” Reffue said.
Food boxes and shopping are two aspects that have not been immune to COVID-necessitated alterations.
To keep operations going amidst the pandemic, the Christmas Stocking had to stop enlisting the help of volunteer shoppers, food box packagers and delivery people.
They have been sending shopping coupons to families to pick out their own items, and Maple Leaf Cheese started packaging food boxes for participants to pick up themselves.
Schmidt, the food box coordinator-to-be whose two daughters, Melisa Schmidt-Zettle and Samantha Stewart, are planning to help her with the role, got involved with the program’s food box efforts long before the COVID-created changes as a Girl Scout leader when her daughters were in the group in the 1980s.
“I was known as the box lady, because every time we went to the grocery store, we had to pick up apple boxes [to serve as food boxes], and my vehicle would be full of (hundreds of assembled) apple boxes from early September on through until November,” she reminisced.
Along with collecting the boxes, the Scouts used to wrap the boxes in paper and decorate them with drawings or Christmas cards, she said.
Once options for free wrapping paper dwindled and the number of participants in the Christmas Stocking grew, it became less feasible and too labor intensive to wrap them all, and they eventually stopped doing that, Schmidt said.
More recently, the COVID-19 situation has created even more changes, Schmidt added. While volunteers from the community will not be coming together to pack up and deliver the boxes again in 2021 due to the virus, “I guess we’re just going to have to see what next year brings for us,” she said.
It is possible that she will work on finding a hybrid approach to the food box systems used pre- and mid-COVID in the future, if the situation gets back to something more like normal, she added.
Schneider and Coplien, the new treasurer and fundraising coordinators, are hoping they can bring volunteer shoppers back to help in future years, returning to the pre-COVID state of being.
Not having shoppers saves them a step in their role, they noted, since they only have to compare coupons from families to bills from stores and don’t have to cross-check receipts from shoppers.
Even so, “I like having the shoppers involved,” Schneider and Coplien agreed. Both of them started as shoppers themselves, and Coplien’s four grown children have all also acted as shoppers in their adult lives.
Coplien’s 28-year-old daughter, a member of the Woman’s Club, will be assisting with the treasury/fundraising leadership job, too.
A big aim of theirs this year is to have everything run smoothly and “match up and work out right,” said Coplien.
The coordinators who are stepping up will be part of the team effort that Spielman says is the Christmas Stocking project.
“Even though the Woman’s Club, the Christmas Stocking [organizes] it, it is a community project,” Reffue noted.
And despite stepping down from their coordinator roles, Spielman and Reffue both said they will still be around to support it.
