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December Sisterhood Program Showcase

Event: Annual Holiday Cookie Project
From: Sisterhood Agudas Achim in Austin, TX

Concept: While most of the country has a holiday on Christmas Day, our emergency responders must be at their jobs all day. In order make their day a little brighter, our Sisterhood has been organizing cookie delivery to firemen, police stations, and hospitals for over fifteen years. We get the entire synagogue involved. This is a great program for families with young children. Generally, if a family with children delivers cookies to these places, they are given a tour. Fire stations and police stations are a big hit with the kids.

Although Sisterhood does some of the baking, we encourage all synagogue members to bring baked or store-bought cookies. We also purchase candy canes or other candy to add a festive touch to the boxes. We have had many synagogue members volunteer for every step of this program. On Christmas Day, the food is placed in boxes* for delivery. Because our kitchen is Kosher and we are not allowed to bring in food, we use the multi-purpose room in our school building to put the boxes together. Each person or family is given the boxes to deliver and two, three, or four places to deliver to. We also serve a small breakfast to our volunteers.

Download the to-do list for this program here!

Download a sample of the route information here!

You will note that this is a volunteer-intensive program. We have been doing it for many years and we get plenty of volunteers. If you do not get enough volunteers the first time you try this, you can scale back the program to deliver to fewer places. Once the word gets around, you will have a bigger response the following year!

If you have questions, you can email Cindy Fudman at cfudman@gmail.com.

*You can use plates instead of boxes. If you choose this option, you will need cellophane wrapping paper to wrap each plate and ribbon to tie the paper at the top. Instead of decorating the boxes, you can decorate cards to put on each plate.

We encourage you to share your unique programs with us so that we can Showcase your Sisterhood Program. Please send your program outlines, flyers and photos to Marsha Strongin at marsha@strongin.net. Together we will engage, enrich and empower our Sisterhood members.