ELLY GRIMM

   • Leader & Times

The holiday season might be a few months away yet, but a campaign to help local families have a brighter Christmas is already going on.

Knights of Columbus member Todd Bradley said such efforts have been going on for multiple decades at this point.

“This will be our 37th year for Toys for Tots, and so we will. We’re starting to kick it off by selling tickets for our gun raffle and some other prizes,” Bradley said. “We’re also working with the Harbingers motorcycle group on a Toys For Tots run for local bikers, and that is scheduled for Oct. 17, and then on Dec. 6, we’ll have a toy run where participants will run or walk a mile. Last year, we had around 80 people who ran last year, which brought in a lot of toys, and we’re looking to hopefully see closer to around 100 people participating this year.”

Such success, Bradley said, would not have been possible without the community’s support.

“I want to give thanks to a lot of people out there. I want to thank Joe Denoyer for all his help, and I want to thank National Beef and also National Beef employees, they brought in toys for us,” Bradley said. “Ollie’s has also done really good with us by giving us a discount with the toys and giving us free color books on the toy bags. It’s always gone well in the past, and we’ve always had enough toys for everybody. We want to make sure we get enough toys to where we have everything for everybody. We couldn’t do things like this if the community didn’t support what we did, and I couldn’t be more grateful for that.”

Bradley said he hopes to see a lot of community support with this year’s campaign.

“That support you’re giving will be going toward families who don’t have anything to give their kids for Christmas,” Bradley said. “A lot of these families only have a Christmas tree, but no presents, and so by doing this, we’re helping make some families’ holidays brighter than they would have been otherwise. We’ve been averaging about 70 to 80 families here these last couple years, and if that number drops, that’s a good thing because that means there’s not as many people out there who need gifts. Each book has five tickets, so people can buy one ticket for $5 or five tickets for $20. Anyone wanting to buy tickets can either come down to the Knights of Columbus hall Monday nights when we have Bingo, or they can get in touch with any of the Knights. They’ll all have tickets, and people can also call me at (620) 391-0044 and I’ll meet them and give them the tickets they want. The raffle will be Oct. 17 after the run with the Harbingers group.”

Bradley said he hopes this year’s campaign will be able to help many families in the community.

“We want to raise a lot of money and bring in a lot of toys. We usually raise quite a bit of money with the gun raffle, but then also with National Beef and the employees, they always bring a lot of games and toys for us,” Bradley said. “We also have multiple individuals out there who donate pretty regularly, and we’re grateful for all of them and all of their support. Really, we just want to provide toys for all the kids out there whose Christmas might be looking kidn of gloomy.”

Bradley said he hopes this year’s Toys For Tots campaign will be another successful one.

“The run we had last year was the first one we had and it was very successful, and so we already set the date with Joe Denoyer on that, and we’re really excited,” Bradley said. “We’re also really excited to be working with the Harbingers group again – that worked out really well last year, so we’ll continue with that group again for this year.”