Christmas Stocking Fund
The Christmas Stocking Fund is an annual effort of the Monroe Woman's Club. The club collects money and other donations, and distributes clothes, toys and vouchers for shoes and boots to children in need in the Monroe school district. Families also receive food boxes, complete with ingredients to prepare a holiday meal, delivered before Christmas. Cheer boxes are also delivered to the elderly.
Every year, the Christmas Stocking benefits hundreds of families. Names of families in need are offered confidentially by school officials, counselors and area churches. The effort requires a multitude of volunteers who shop for families, bake cookies and pack and deliver food boxes.
To donate to the Christmas Stocking Fund, send contributions to 901 16th Ave., Monroe, Wis., 53566. All contributions are used locally to fund the program. A pre-addressed
envelope is also included inside today's edition of the Times.
Donations provide the club with the funds and goods to distribute holiday food boxes to hundreds of families and elderly and to provide clothes, toys and shoes or boots to children in need in the Monroe school district.
This year, more than 30 businesses, including banks and manufacturers across Monroe, have made room for toys dropped off for the Christmas Stocking.
But many other business owners, such as brothers Jake and Louis Sherer, have donated their time and efforts as well to make the program run smoothly.
Each fall, Jake Sherer, owner of Monroe One Hour Cleaners, cleans a "couple hundred" coats that are donated and collected at his place of business on 9th Avenue near downtown Monroe and by other business and groups. He said he doesn't mind the added workload. In August, he's ready for the first drop-offs.
"I look forward to it," he said. "It comes in, in small groups, so it's not bad."
The coats are ready by November, so volunteer shoppers can sort through them to match sizes with their lists of children, but coats can be donated at any time, Sherer said. He cleans and stores them for the following year's coat drive.
"It can always be used," he said.
The establishment has been involved in the coat drive since it first began, sometime in the mid-1980s, when he was still just an employee there, he said. Tom Koeller was the owner then.
Sherer doesn't remember how many coats were donated in those early years, nor does he know exactly how many coats he has cleaned each year since he bought the business seven years ago.
"Ah, we don't keep count," he said. "We don't bother. But this year was a better year."
Louis Sherer, owner of Sherer Moving and Storage in Monroe, doesn't recall when it was that he went into action to supply the tables volunteers need to pack the hundreds of food boxes delivered each Christmas Eve day.
He said he heard that volunteers were "bending over to pack all these boxes on the floor. I thought, "Nuts, I wouldn't want to do that.' I have all these tables sitting here (in storage) all winter."
The first year, he brought about 20-25 tables, each about 6 or 8 feet long.
"We were up to 40 last year or ... well, we shoved all we could into Dearth Motors showroom floor," he said.
With his employee Dan Holmes, Sherer takes about two hours to set up the tables before volunteers arrive to fill them, and another couple hours to take them down and move them back into storage. And if he arrives before they are finished, Sherer said he has helped pack up the last of the perishables and made food box deliveries.