When the Spirit of Christmas came to York

The team at the charity Spirit of Christmas have been organising and running very special Christmas parties for local families for the last 11 years in Selby and Doncaster. In these 11 years, they have invited over 4000 children plus adults, for a stress-free Christmas celebration. Their parties are all socially inclusive and affordable. Each child who comes receives a snack box, a personalised present from Santa and is entertained by the merry band of elves.

This is where Crombie Wilkinson Solicitors came in and were able to help support the charity with their first Spirit of Christmas event in York on 15 December in Acomb. They worked with York Children’s Services to invite those local families who were most in need, giving away all of the tickets for free.

Sharon Richardson, Director at Crombie Wilkinson Solicitors said: “Each year we choose community projects for our offices to support to ensure we deliver on our key Value of 'Community focus - we are passionate and active in giving back to the communities where we live and work.'

The team at our York office were delighted to be approached by this amazing Spirit of Christmas project with the opportunity for us to help with the York Christmas party and being asked if we wanted to be special helpers to make the party even more amazing was a privilege. Myself and the other staff volunteers from our York office thoroughly enjoyed helping out with the activities including Santa’s Grotto, refreshments and the book stall. We hope our help really made it a memorable and magical Christmas experience for the children and adults. It was an afternoon of fun, laughter and good old fashioned Christmas merriment.”

Ronnie Munro, Chair of Spirit of Christmas, said: “Without volunteers, our parties would just not go ahead and we want every child to be able to experience meeting Santa and the magic of Christmas our events bring to them and their families. The Crombie Wilkinson Solicitors volunteers did a brilliant job. We catered for around 100 children plus adults and everyone had a great time.

We could never have run the event so smoothly without the Crombie Wilkinson staff - particularly the lady who helped in the grotto as some naughty elves must have got in to the ticketing system causing a little stress but the Christmas spirit helped the grotto team pull things off without anyone knowing! A big thank you to everyone who helped and came to enjoy the event.”