Join in on the Christmas fun and support RC Lexington at Southern Lights at the Kentucky Horse Park. Santa will be visiting and available for photos as you tour the park and enjoy the lights and holiday spirit! Below is some information about RC Lexington's participation in the fundraising project
Lexington Rotary Club’s Santa Claus/Winter Coat Program
In November 1996, the Rotary Club of Lexington was approached about getting involved in a magnificent Christmas light show called “Southern Lights” which at that time was in its infancy at The Kentucky Horse Park, one of Kentucky’s premier tourist attractions.
The specific need of the show’s sponsors was a Santa Claus who would talk to visitors while sitting in a sleigh in a winter wonderland setting with “elves” available to take pictures at a nominal cost of $5.00. At the same time, our club recognized a dire need in the community for a coat bank for young school-aged children. Combining the two programs seemed a logical move. One of the Club’s members, whose family owned a chain of family clothing stores, volunteered to secure new coats at the phenomenal cost of $10 each in a variety of sizes and colors, and the Santa/Winter Coat Program was born.
Never in recent history has a project so captivated the hearts of Lexington Rotarians as this one did. This is evidenced by the fact that each year better than one-third of our active members of all ages give, not their money, but their time, for this wonderful cause.
The project has done more to get its members involved than anything the 96-year club has ever done.
The Christmas 2010 event marked the fifteenth consecutive year that Rotarians, friends, and families have opened their hearts and cleared a night during their busy holiday seasons in order that children in Fayette County might have warm coats. The job of recruiting Santas and elves has really become no job at all. It requires over one hundred volunteers to cover the thirty-four or so nights – from the Friday before Thanksgiving through December 23rd (with Thanksgiving night off). They rise to the occasion and get the job done. Each night they show up to give four hours of their already heavily-scheduled December. Participation has become an annual family event as daddies play Santa and wives and children play elves – all in appropriate attire. Each year we have new recruits, but some are about to be fifteen-year veterans.
Christmas of 1996 netted approximately $5000, with each successive year bringing in more money. The ambitious Santas and elves of 2010 grossed $22,295.
Approximately eight hundred children in the community received coats that first year, compliments of the Rotary Club of Lexington. All Fayette County school family resource coordinators and most of the social service agencies in the county eagerly await notification that it is time for the annual Rotary fall coat distribution. In the fall of 2007, hats, gloves and socks were included along with the coats. Twelve hundred coats, 1200 hats, 2400 pairs of socks, and 2400 pairs of gloves were picked up in October 2010 by grateful recipients. Many children in families who have had no prior knowledge of a Rotary Club now proudly wear their Rotary gifts and know that Rotary is indeed a service club which believes in its motto of Service Above Self.
An additional feature of the coat distribution process, added in 2002, was the participation of a junior Girl Scout troop. To earn their community service badges they participated, along with Rotary volunteers, in sorting the coats by size and gender to make distribution easier. Theirs is truly a labor of love – children helping children less fortunate than they.
All of the participants, if asked, would tell you what a heart-warming and personally rewarding experience it continues to be for them. One “Santa” likes nothing better than to tell his favorite story about the evening. The sister of a little boy who had badly crippled legs shared with Santa that “He is o.k. He was born that way.” My own personal favorite experience, as coordinator of the program, happened in cleaning out my storeroom several years ago. Oddly, a baby’s pacifier fell off a shelf. Only I would know why such an item would be in the office and why it evoked such a myriad of memories and emotions. Most people remember using any method possible to entice children to give up their pacifiers. If so, you can relate to a somewhat harried mother who took her wee one to see Rotary’s Santa Claus at the Horse Park, promising him that he could talk to Santa if he would agree to surrender his pacifier to the jolly fat guy. Apparently it worked, but, frankly, I’m happy that I was not a first-hand witness to the event and only heard the story when “Santa” came in and dropped the child’s former “best friend” on my desk.
While not every community has a Kentucky Horse Park which draws hundreds of thousands of visitors during the holiday season, every one does have a mall, a park, or some other facility which could be made to accommodate Santa, and the project could be emulated on a smaller scale with modifications anywhere where Rotarians have the heart to make it work.
