'Tis the Season to Donate

The holiday season is winding down to and avid Christmas shoppers run around crowded department stores to grab the iPods, Playstations, Jordan sneakers and latest fashion gear off the family wish list. 

Meanwhile Peggy Triplitt, 60, and Antonette Wood, 52, hurry and work diligently on their gifts of giant red bags with goodies for the folks in the senior citizen centers around Santa Cruz County.  And you can be sure there won’t be the latest copy of “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2” on Blu Ray in the gift bag.

Triplitt and Wood are co-owners of the Swing Time Café in Watsonville and run the local establishment for most of the year. But in the final weeks of December the tiny café is closed down for a mini Santa’s workshop. And since last Friday night the owners of the café have assembled gift bags for local senior citizens with donations that were made by people primarily from Santa Cruz County.

Items include everyday hygiene products such as toothbrushes, toothpaste, bars of soap, hand sanitizer and other small things like scarves, blankets, gloves, hats, oranges, pears and one week’s supply of soups which can go a long way for the older group of people. 

“What we do is we collect, we bag, and deliver.” says Triplitt. 

“Once we deliver to the senior centers, that’s it.  We have no connection, they figure out what they want to do with it.” said Triplitt. 

It’s been seven years since Triplitt and Wood started this annual tradition of putting together these heart warmed gifts for the needy and sometimes neglected senior citizens.  However, it wasn’t always this easy to know what it takes to put together the perfect gift bag.  Wood recalls why she and Triplitt stopped to cater personal request in the gift bags.

“Our first year we did that for 20 seniors and that was our hardest year we ever did.” said Wood.

“It was very specific items.” said Wood.

“In the second year we thought we could do 135 seniors, so we chose 135. There was more than 220 in the senior center.  So when we got there we realized that that’s not fair, people were there and they were not going to get anything.” added Triplitt.

“So the next year we just decided we’re going to give everybody a gift” said Triplitt.

But Triplitt and Wood can still remember how impossible it was to figure out whether or not certain clothes would fit the seniors comfortably.

“The first three years we tried to give them [seniors] sweatshirts and stuff. And that was very hard because you needed to know the sizes, and that was really hard.” said Triplitt.

The dynamic duo has learned from their mistakes and a couple of new tricks in the process gift bag making.

“We call the senior centers and say ‘How many people do you have? How many male, how many female?” said Triplitt.

Now that Triplitt and Wood have somewhat gotten down a routine, all that’s left is for the people to keep donating a steady flow of blankets and soups. They can also use a hand or two to help construct some gift bags that can help speed up the process and it gives them a chance to reach their goal of 1,000 bags by Wednesday. 

So far they are halfway there with 500 bags and only a few days left until distribution night. Not only does it feel good to know an assortment of simple gifts can bring a smile to the face of a senior citizen, but perhaps it may save a life or two.

“Two years ago or three years ago, we picked up another senior center and just honestly dropped the bags. And then we got a call…actually the woman came into our café and said, she was in tears, ‘I was down to my last bit of food, I had pneumonia, and I had no way of getting food and all of a sudden this bag of food shows up at my door,’ she says ‘you saved my life.’”

Next time the thought about donating to someplace needy, don’t think twice about giving to the people who once helped shape the communities that we all live upon now.  And keep in mind what the famous John D. Rockefeller Jr. once said, “Think of giving not as a duty but as a privilege.”