Seventy years ago Addie Crist and Irene Flanders sat together to sew six red cloth stockings.
They filled them mostly with necessaries but also with a ray of Christmas delight for six needy Island kids.
They didn’t call it the Red Stocking Fund and could not have known their simple act of kindness would become an extraordinary source of hope and joy for several thousand Island children and their families.
The Red Stocking Fund is the Vineyard's holiday Santa. Red Stocking elves are already quietly working behind the scenes to make sure every Island child with needs has a warm and love-filled season. Last year 275 children in 173 families got a boost of holiday cheer, thanks to Red Stocking. This year the number is expected to be higher.
More than a decade ago Ida (Buzzy) Gardner wrote a story about a
woman who brought small toys to young children on Martha's
Vineyard. The Santa Claus Lady was her name, and as the story goes she
"brought Christmas in tiny packages wrapped in odd pieces of paper
tightly tied with bits of ribbon."
When Lorraine Clark walks into Grace Church in Vineyard Haven on the
morning of Dec. 17, Christmas officially begins.
There, packed high to the ceiling and filling almost every available
space will be over 250 large, white bags - each one stuffed with
dozens of wrapped gifts. Each bag will be marked with its own number,
and soon people will trickle in to claim them.
Red Stocking Fillers This Year Will Delight 270 Island Children
By ALEXIS TONTI
At the other end of the year from the sleek summer fundraising
season, a grassroots charity pursues its purpose.
The Red Stocking Fund holds no auctions or celebrity fundraisers. It
has no board of directors, and its managers bear no administrative
titles. The core group of volunteers meets only once a year to set the
date - this year, Dec. 19 - on which strained and straitened
parents will receive the Island's gifts for more than 270 of its
children.
"Christmas was about getting nothing," she says in
clipped Yankee cadence. Lorraine Beaucaire Clark's family did not
speak English when they came from Portugal; her great-uncle, a Chilmark
resident for 55 years,speaks only Portuguese.
