City church helps make Christmas merrier for care home residents

In the Dr. Seuss story, How the Grinch Stole Christmas, the Grinch’s heart grew “three sizes that day” when he realized Christmas wasn’t about getting presents yourself — but about giving joy to others.

That is something members of the Church of St. Stephen and St. Bede here in Winnipeg don’t have to learn. They already know it.

The small congregation of 20 to 25 people put their big hearts on display again last Sunday when they lined up presents at the front of the church for 24 lonely residents of the Charleswood Extendicare personal care home on Roblin Boulevard.

The gift-giving was arranged by Karen Samsom, a member of the church’s council. “We love to do it,” she said, noting the gifts would be going to residents who have no family in the city to give them a gift at Christmas.

The congregation has been collecting items for various organizations in the city for about 10 years. They began giving gifts to residents at the long-term care home two years ago. “These are people who get no visitors, who have no one,” she said.

Each year before Christmas, Samsom asks the facility for a list of people who wouldn’t otherwise get a gift on Christmas Day. Those residents are then asked what they would most like as a Christmas gift. If it is clothing, they include their sizes.

“It’s quite a variety of things we get asked to give,” Samsom said, noting that things asked for this year included sweatpants, jeans, runners, socks, music CDs — even pork rinds.

Members of the church then take the lists and go shopping for them. After buying them, they wrap them. On December 14, the gifts were brought to the church and arranged at the front of the sanctuary to be blessed before delivery to the care home.

During that blessing, interim priest Chris Salstrom — who also is a spiritual care practitioner at Riverview Health Centre — spoke about what the gifts would mean for recipients.

“Twenty-four people will wake up on Christmas morning and have something to open,” she said, adding that from her first-hand experience working in spiritual care she knew how much that would mean to them.

“I work with people like that every single day,” she said, noting there are many people in long-term care homes who feel alone. “It will make their lives a bit more joyful to know that people they have never even met thought of them.”

Research supports Salstrom’s experience. A 2018 study noted by Hospital News, a Canadian health care news source, found that 55 per cent of residents of long-term care homes feel lonely and isolated.

It’s worse for those who have no one to visit them. This could be because of the death of a spouse, divorce, having never married, being estranged from children or having no children.

One of the congregants who bought a gift was Donna Friesen. “I love doing it,” she said, noting that she bought a pair of jeans for a resident.

“It’s a wonderful thing to do,” she added. “It’s nice to be able to do that for them. It’s a good feeling.”

The congregation that provides these gifts dates back to 1970. That’s when members of St. Stephen’s Lutheran and St. Bede’s Anglican churches in St. James decided to combine as one joint Anglican-Lutheran church — 31 years before Anglicans and Lutherans in Canada formally entered into full communion with the signing of the Waterloo Declaration.

Due to a decreasing and aging membership, the church was unable to keep up with the cost of maintaining their building. They sold it almost three years ago and now rent space from St. Mary Anglican Church in Charleswood for their Sunday services.

Salstrom has been serving the congregation in a very part-time way for just over two years. The church may be small, she said, and made up mostly of seniors, but it “punches above its weight … they never met a cause they didn’t want to try to do something about.”

That includes providing mittens for children at two local schools, doing Christmas carolling for shut-ins and people in long term care homes, supporting a local food bank and donating to international relief and development efforts through aid organizations.

Salstrom is especially grateful for the gifts they provide to lonely seniors. “It’s heartbreaking to see people who have no one to visit or think of them, especially at Christmas,” she said.

For her, “it’s not about the size of the church, but the size of the heart of the congregation. This church has a heart that is many times bigger than the numbers of people who attend it … I will have a more joyful Christmas knowing that someone cares for those who have nobody to care for them.”

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