December Charity Challenge...Playing Santa!

I spent the earlier part of this week playing Santa.
As some of you know, in the past I've sold toys and collectibles on eBay.  I still have a METRIC TON of old, still in the package toys left to sell.

I've been a member on a Yahoo List called Christmas Wishes for the past 4 years.  It was set up by a local woman here.  The purpose of this list is to allow folks who want to help fulfill Christmas wishes to find folks who need help at the holidays.  It's open to any person who lives in PA.  I do believe the owner of the list has also opened up similar lists for every state since.

Anyway, people who are having difficulty providing Santa for their kids or grandkids at Christmas post to be adopted on this list.  Usually they are people who can't get on the Toys for Tots, Salvation Army or other local charity lists.  They either are among the working poor who make too much money to qualify for these programs or they have had a recent setback, like a loss of employment or other financial crisis or something like a house fire, left an abusive relationship, etc.  The reasons for needing the help run the gamut.

So most every year I gather up a bunch of the toys I have left to sell and offer them on that list.  The folks who respond arrange to meet me and I give the parents/grandparents the toys so their kids don't go without a gift at Christmas.  There were also quite a few requests for teenage girls who wanted girly stuff like toiletries and makeup this year, so I raided some of my toiletries/make-up stockpile as well.
Here are some of the goodies I delivered around Teeny Tiny Town this week.....

There were another 3 bags of toys that hubby delivered up by his job this week that I didn't get photos of first.

This is the only reason why I mentioned in the last post that I 'might' go out toy clearance shopping in the next week, even though none of my kids are of the age where they are into toys anymore.
I had used that Kmart Toy Clearance $5/$20 Q and used the BOGO Transformers Q this summer to get some toys very inexpensively.  Those toys were given out on the ChristmasWishes List as well.

Not sure on the value of all this as I haven't tried adding it up yet, but it has to be at least $300 of toys/toiletries.

So did you make an charitable donations this month?
Tell us all about it and be sure to link and check out the CHARITY CHALLENGE over on the CVS SAVER BLOG.  The Charity Challenge is located Here.