The year-long Holly House timeline

You may wonder what it takes to get everything we need for our 2000 children at the Holly House event in December...well, it takes lots of planning, storage, and donations!! Here's a graphic showing the things that happen throughout the year to gather thousands of toys, pajamas, socks, underwear, books, and so much more.

Click to enlarge

But, we can't do it without a LOT of volunteers! Won't you consider hosting a stuffed animal drive with your friends, or maybe ask them to bring socks and underwear to a social event? Please see our Volunteer page for ideas on how to help, and for a listing of open volunteer positions.

Pajama Sorting Party update

We had an amazing turnout for our big pajama sorting party this past weekend. Thank you to the 22 incredibly hard working volunteers who came to unwrap, size/sort, re-package, and move 2100 pairs of pajamas!

The night started with a small hiccup with the van (which was filled to the brim with pajamas) not starting - but quick work to move all of the boxes to a different vehicle enabled Pam to get to the storage facility just a few minutes late. Everyone jumped on board to get things set up. Phyllis 'conducted' what became a symphony of workers.





Two truckloads of sorted pajamas were moved to a different storage facility during the party, and the rest were moved about 8:45 once everything was complete - including clean up! It could not have gone more smoothly and would definitely taken much longer had we been short some
helpers. These sorted pajamas will now be ready to display for our December Holly House event.

The 2100 pajamas came to us from a very generous donation. Most of them were sized infant to 5T (and mostly for girls), so we look forward to being able to fill in the gaps for older kids and the boys throughout the year with more donations. Our goal is go give every one of our 2000 children two pairs of warm pajamas this year - one to wear and one for the wash.





Thank you to Molina Health Care, Wells Fargo Bank, Kohl's, the Mountlake Terrace Senior Center, Windemere, kids and teachers from several of our schools, pizza from Garlic Jim's and of course, our Holly House Team for a job well done.

Partnering with Wells Fargo

Sarah Darrah (Wells Fargo Store Manager) and Rakhi Samant (Wells Fargo District Manager) are presenting the pony named Shamrock to CJ Gray (Cedar Valley Principal),  Allison Kaufman (Cedar Valley office Manager), Nancy Sutherland (Edmonds School District Nurse), and Taira Rink (one of the 3rd Grade Teachers at Cedar Valley Community School).

Holly House has some wonderful partners who help us along our journey, and Wells Fargo is one of them. Recently, they donated a large stuffed pony to us, and we wanted to find the best home for him. We reached out to Cedar Valley Elementary (one of the 15 schools we support), and came up with a way to get him to a deserving student.

The folks from Wells Fargo met with Cedar Valley staff a couple of weeks ago and presented them with the pony. The school is going to use it as an incentive for an academic program.

Even Shamrock the pony has 12th man spirit!

We are happy to be able to connect these two very important organizations together, and thank Wells Fargo for their generous and ongoing support.

Look how they have involved Shamrock in their school spirit already!