Festival of Giving

I'll start out by telling you that this is one of my favorite times of of the year at the library. For the third year in a row, we have held a Festival of Giving during the second week of December.  There is something for everyone during this week long event. This year the Children's Room sponsored a Mitten Tree.  We encouraged patrons to donate new, unused mittens, gloves, hats and scarves for all ages. All donations will benefit the Monmouth County Department of Children & Family Services.  For preschoolers, we shared stories about hats, and then children got to make their own hat! For school-aged children, we read stories about mittens and made mitten wreaths. The library is donating a winter item to our Mitten Tree in honor of each child that attended these programs.

Our after hours tween event this month was Popcorn Art. The tweens made snowmen out of popcorn balls. My part-time librarian, Linda, found some fleece from when we made blankets for the teens for Project Linus in years past. She found a pattern online for scarves where you cut slits and then pull the strings and they make a corkscrew style string. They were pretty cool and the tweens LOVED making them. We are also donating the scarves they made to our Mitten tree.

The Children's Librarian who preceded me, Sara, started a Make a Gift program with the teens over five years ago. I've kept it up since her departure, but it is a ton of work. We create an assembly line of ingredients in our meeting room, and then have our teens volunteer their time to make soup mix & cookie mix in a jar.  I buy all of the ingredients ahead of time (and calculate the math!) This year we donated 108 jars to the Matawan Food Pantry.

During the entire month of December we also have a program called "Food for Fines." We'll forgive library fines and waive the fee for a replacement card with the donation of a non-perishable food item or hygiene item.