Beds from Quaker Christmas Shelter 2008. Photo: Photo courtesy Quaker Homeless Action.
No Christmas tree…
Robina Barton shares her experience of volunteering at the Quaker Open Christmas homless shelter
A friend asked me the other day when I last had a Christmas tree. I told him 1991. What happened after that? Well 1992 was the first year I volunteered for Quaker Open Christmas (now the ‘Quaker Christmas Shelter’). As I recall (and my dad may tell a different story), it all began when dad came home from having a pint in the pub – where he got a lot of his best ideas. He had read in the Friend that volunteers were needed for a Quaker run Christmas shelter in Blackfriars, and he said wouldn’t it be a good and worthwhile thing for our family to go and do it? We (my mum, my seventeen-year-old brother and myself, aged fifteen) were somewhat jaded with the empty commercialism of Christmas and thought this was a splendid idea. Next morning, dad was regretting his impulsive suggestion. Unfortunately for him, the rest of us still thought it was a splendid idea, and my aunt did too, so that was that.
