Boys & Girls Club asking community to ‘adopt’ club members for annual Christmas party

BOWLING GREEN, Ky. (WBKO) - The Boys & Girls Club of Bowling Green is preparing to host its annual Christmas Extravaganza. Before that happens, the club is looking for members of the community to ‘adopt’ a club member and help get them the things on their Christmas wish list.

Every year, the club hosts a party for members and their families who may need a little extra help getting gifts for the holidays.

“We’ve done this for probably 30 years and we adopt out all of our club members to community members,” said Boys & Girls Club CEO, Liz Bernard Clark.

Before the event, each child who is a member of the club fills out a questionnaire form with three wishes.

Once members of the community ‘adopt’ a child, they can either shop for them or make a monetary donation, and members of the club will do the shopping.

After the presents have been gathered and dropped off staff members and community volunteers help wrap the presents.

“We actually utilize one of our larger classrooms and set up the North Pole. It’s a wrapping station, you can’t see the floor you can barely see the walls and our staff members will take time in between things or they’ll come in early to wrap,” Bernard Clark said.

On the day of the party, all the children are brought into the club’s gym and handed their bag of gifts.

“Santa is even there,” she said. “They all open their gifts at the same time. So these aren’t gifts that they’ll take home, they open them right there right then and it is just pure magic.”

As for the energy in the room during the event, Bernard Clark described it as electric, adding that there is nothing like the magic of watching the kids open their presents.

“I would put that up against anything,” she said. “We often think of little kids, and certainly there’s joy, but we serve all the way through age 18 and the teenagers have just as much joy and excitement too because they are a population that in almost every scenario get overlooked”.

This year, the party will be on Dec.14, starting at 4 p.m. While they prefer to have everything for the party ready by the Monday before, if there is a last-minute drop-off, Bernard Clark said they can accommodate it.

If you would like to ‘adopt’ a club member, you can call the club at (270) 843-6466 or send an email to Abbey Kitchens at abbeykitchens@gmail.com.

For more information about the club visit bgcbg.org or their Facebook page.

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