Our family goal was to raise some money during the Christmas season to donate to someone in need.  We let the kids decide who they wanted to help (they insisted on the typhoon victims in the Philippines) and brainstormed ideas for how to make it happen.  They wanted to sell something.  I told them that this year instead of making toffee for neighbor gifts (like we do every year, a tradition that I’ve grown to love), we could sell the toffee and donate all the money for the typhoon recovery.  This will be a nice, little project.  I thought.

I was elbow deep in butter and sugar and cello bags for 2 weeks.  I was constantly washing pans and tying ribbons and sending kids to deliver our treats to neighbors.  All in addition to a traveling husband, Christmas parties galore, piano recitals, preschool programs, basketball games, babysitting, planning a big Christmas Eve dinner, getting everything ready for Christmas morning, and making sure the kids studied their spelling words.  December was busy.

Now that our toffee project is over, I’m a little bit sad, but a little relieved too.  I thought that we’d make some money…maybe $50 (or $100 if I was really optimistic!).  Our plan was to announce it on facebook/instagram to get some orders, and then when those were filled, we (the kids) were going to go door to door to sell the rest.  We never got around to knocking on doors.  We ended up with orders for more than 100 bags of toffee, just from our online pitch alone!  I usually make three or four batches of toffee during the Christmas season.  This year I made 10!

We collected over $300 (which includes all the chocolate, butter {10 pounds!}, sugar & nuts that we donated to the cause).  We let the boys take $25 each to school for a fundraiser they wanted to participate in to help build a school in Kenya.  Even after sending $50 for this other charitable cause, we were still able to donate $262 to help in the Philippines.  More than we would have donated if we had just picked a charity and sent some money.

I am very humbled and grateful to everyone who helped us with our family fundraiser.  It was valuable for our children to learn that there are others in the world who need help when sad things happen.  Our efforts were small, but they will help someone, somewhere in the Philippines.  Someone that may have lost their home or car, or maybe even a loved one.  Someone that we will never meet, but who we hope will be positively impacted by our typhoon toffee.