Christmas Box 2023 – Thank you
The woman enters the room with two small children clutching at her dress. The children peer nervously at the array of strangers facing them. The room is quite crowded now – there are a number of friendly looking ladies, and couple of taller men stood to one side. An oddly decorated tree dominates one corner. Another man appears in the door way behind with a camera. The atmosphere is not unfriendly, but there is no reason for the children to let go of their mother’s dress yet.
The older of the two children looks beyond the crowd of faces and sees the L-shaped table that extends along two sides of the room. He sees the presents sitting on and under the table. His younger sister follows his gaze. Now, here is a reason to let go of the dress…
The Syrian family has dropped into the old house in central Sofia that is home to the Council of Refugee Women in Bulgaria. Mum has heard that there are presents available for her children if she drops in during the next couple of days. She heard right. Over 400 presents have been made available for CRWB to distribute by House of Opportunity’s Christmas Box Appeal. “We have been very busy all day,” says Dessislava Petrova, CRWB’s Humanitarian Programme Coordinator. “We don’t tell the families that the presents are available, but word spreads very quickly, and so they come.”
The House of Opportunity Christmas box team stopped by for a visit mid-afternoon , and some 90 families had already been in that day. Dessislava and her team of volunteers will be here until 5pm or 6pm, and they will be open all day Friday too.
Now the two children are clutching their newly acquired presents as they follow their mother back outside. Mum doesn’t go empty handed – another organisation has donated some gifts for grown ups too. “We’re so grateful that we can have these Christmas boxes to give out. These families have very little, and many are facing a really uncertain future, especially the Ukrainians”, explains Dessislava. “Nearly half the families we have seen today are refugees from the war there. These presents are really welcome. To be able to give something, some small hope, it means a lot to these parents and their children”.
All over Bulgaria, the 7,204 Christmas boxes donated by House of Opportunity supporters bring joy and smiles.
To children in rural kindergartens; to bed-bound senior citizens; to Roma families struggling through the thick mud to receive presents on a freezing wind-swept hillside; to children who have no families to share Christmas with in orphanage homes; to kids in a Roma football club in a huge sprawling neighbourhood of semi-legal housing and rough industry; to mothers, aunties and grandmas looking after their children hundreds of miles from their husbands, sons and brothers in the war back home: wherever the Christmas box team go, they are welcomed with warmth and excitement, and the presents that you donated are received with a great deal of enthusiasm by young and old.
Thank you for donating a Christmas box, giving your time to help check and pack Christmas boxes, and helping to make the Christmas Box Appeal what it is, and has been all these years. Something that sometimes feels increasingly rare. A source of joy.
Photos by Rich Haydon.
