The season of giving and holiday cheer is approaching once again. It is time to buy and donate toys to Toys For Tots program.

“Toys For Tots, is basically, a system where people can donate toys to benefit children whose parents are financially insecure,” said Ms. Smallwood, Rho Kappa’s advisor, as she explained what the program is. Rho Kappa is in charge of the donations being collected at Urbana High School. She has known about Toys For Tots for a long time. She said this is “because my family is prior military. The Toys For Tots program has been around for a long time.”

Smallwood said, “I was just amazed at how this program started out in California by a small marine group and now it’s nationwide, worldwide.” She decided to help out the program because sometimes certain unfortunate financial issues occur that can’t be controlled, like the economy doing poorly.
The parents are affected by this, and in turn the children are too, and they can’t do anything about it. The situation is out of their hands. Smallwood said, “So this way, at least, they can have a little joy of Christmas if their parents can’t provide for them.”

The donated toys are sent to a big warehouse and are sorted according to age, gender, etc. Then they send out the toys that have requests.

Smallwood said that the best part about being able to help out is “insuring that children can have a normal childhood just like everyone else. Just so that the holidays can be normal for them just like any other child.”

It’s important to donate because we all have that all time favorite gift we got for a birthday or holiday, etc. It would be really nice to keep that tradition of childhood toy nostalgia going by donating to Toys For Tots.

The donation timeframe is from October to Friday, December 15. The box for donations is located in our school library. The donation goal this year at Urbana is to fill up the box. Hopefully we will be able to reach their goal.