Pincher Creek’s Royal Canadian Legion Branch 43 ran a successful Christmas hamper project this past holiday season. The project has grown into a long-standing tradition of the Legion, one that has supported many households since its inaugural year.

The Christmas hampers are intended to assist local families who struggle with food insecurity, providing enough food to ideally last families the entirety of the Christmas holidays. Any leftover food that remained after the project was organized and taken to the Pincher Creek and District Food Centre to assist locals in the future.

With the help of many local organizations and selfless individuals, the Legion was able to put together and hand out about 100 food hampers to families within the town and MD of Pincher Creek who had previously signed up.

“We had a lot of support from many of the service clubs and various organizations and it made for a tremendous number of volunteers this year — it was amazing to see,” says Maggie Christians, president of Legion Branch 43.

On top of numerous individual volunteers, the Legion received help from several notable entities such as the Pincher Creek women’s shelter, the area 4-H clubs, Napi Friendship Association, the local Lions clubs, the Pincher Creek food centre and many more wonderful groups looking to support the community.

Maggie not only expressed tremendous gratitude to all those who contributed to the project, but furthermore expressed the value of giving such support to the community.

“It always means something when you can help others and this year we had a lot of great  people help. It means a lot to not only the people receiving hampers but to everybody that helped out,” she says.

“It’s just simply a good thing and to do this always feels good. It worked out really well this year.”

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