Impact of Santa's Angels continues to grow, 20 years after group's birth
CBC
As Prince Edward Island's first significant snow of the season touched ground on the Island, so did Jason Bowie.
"We drove in that storm yesterday from Riverview, New Brunswick," Bowie said in a Dec. 22 interview. "Scariest drive over the Confederation Bridge I've ever experienced."
While many people were hunkering down, Bowie was making his way to Skye View Farms, a potato farm in the central P.E.I. community of Elmwood.
What would typically be an hour and a half drive to the Confederation Bridge, plus another 40 minutes to the farm — just over two hours total — turned into a trip that took double that to complete, he said.
His reason for the long, snowy drive? To be part of Santa's Angels, a volunteer group that prepares food boxes and gifts that Santa himself delivers to families on P.E.I. on Christmas Day every year.
Santa's Angels has helped the big guy deliver food boxes and gifts to hundreds of families across the province for the last two decades.
What started out as a handful of folks wandering the streets of Charlottetown on Christmas morning has now, in its 20th year, grown into an operation that requires dozens of U-Haul trucks to transport packed boxes across the Island.
This year, the group assembled 900 food boxes to be delivered to 750 families, said Jennifer MacArthur, a volunteer co-ordinator with the organization.
"We have 26 routes that go out on Christmas Day, from Tignish to Souris," she said.
While she had planned for 60 volunteers, closer to 80 people arrived at Skye View Farms on Dec. 22 to form the assembly line, she said.
"People always show up… people always want to help on P.E.I.," she said. "All the elves are working hard."
The volunteer assembly line was putting together a pallet of 50 boxes in an average of four minutes, said Alex Docherty, the owner of Skye View Farms.
He estimated it would take less than 90 minutes for the group to prepare all 900 boxes needed this year.
"Same as Ford figured out how to build cars every so many minutes, we can fill a box in seconds," he said.
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