If, as a recent documentary suggested, Charles Dickens was the man who “invented Christmas” or, at least, many of the customs associated with it we can conclude that he wouldn’t have classed the Wallace community as a lot of “Scrooges” … unless you count the reformed version of the iconic central character of A Christmas Carol.
Giving gifts is at the heart of Christmas and this year, at our first service since 2019, we took the opportunity to celebrate our fundraising over this term by making formal presentations to a number of charities. House Captain, Michael Rocks, introduced the presentations by reflecting on another famous Victorian, our founder Sir Richard Wallace whose “spirit of generosity” made him the most famous philanthropist of his time.
During the Autumn term of 2022 we raised over £12,000 for a range of charitable causes and we donated cheques totalling £8500 at the Carol Service to representatives of the following causes:
Cancer Fund for Children, Chest, Heart and Stroke, Flourish NI, NIPANC, the Salvation Army and Simon.
We also received gifts as on Festive Dressing Day we distributed Amazon vouchers and Christmas themed goods to raffle winners and stylish dressers. Our Year 8 students, courtesy of the PTA, each received a book from the BookTrust BookBuzz scheme which provides books by popular authors at a discounted price. We are very grateful to the PTA for their very generous sponsorship of the scheme and we hope that our Year 8 pupils enjoyed unwrapping their books. A big thank you to our Year 13 students who helped with the mammoth task of wrapping the 180 gifts!
Whilst we know that all the money donated to the various causes will be put to excellent use we were especially pleased to continue with our traditions of supporting the Christmas hamper appeal in aid of Belfast and Lisburn Women’s Aid organised by Mrs Hawthorne and the RE department. We are delighted to have provided Christmas dinners and gifts via the Salvation Army and are proud to help Simon, NI support the homeless.
As Tiny Tim (almost) said* “God bless them every one!”
* As keen quizzers doubtless know he said “God bless us every one!”
Last modified: January 4, 2023
