On Friday, December 11 from 3-9 Fossil gave a memorable experience to the families that Fossil advisories supported for adopt a family. This event was a heartwarming and memorable one. There were crafts, games, pictures with Santa and food donated by our community. The families got to meet people from the advisory that supported them and got to receive their gifts. Paige Otto is a member of student council and helped with the event on Friday, according to Paige “We encourage people from advisories, for them to send as many people as can come so that they can have that personal connection because that’s really what is very valuable about this because they get to see the people who made this happen for them, it’s not just like a anonymous thing and that’s super cool.”

Fossil advisories are randomly given a family and student council does their best to try and match bigger families with bigger advisories. Student council gets their families from Timberline church. A few years ago Timberline had too many families for their church size to help them  all so they asked Fossil to help them. Originally key club headed up this event, but later it got shifted to student council. Fossil takes in about 100 families per year.

This event is an emotional, but also incredibly rewarding. For Paige Otto seeing everyone come together and getting to see lots of families leave with gifts is the most rewarding part. However, in order to make an event this rewarding happen student council has put in a lot of time and effort. They have been working on this event since the bonfire back in September. According to Paige the hardest part is “This is involving people all over our community, Timberline Church, so many different organizations, 90 different advisories, honestly I think it’s really just making sure everyone is on the same page.”

After being part of this event for three years Otto advises future Fossil students that “although it seems tedious [planning this event and being a part of it], communicating the purpose of the event is most important because people are so much more willing to buy gifts and participate if they understand why their doing it because purpose really drives people and it is such a great meaning behind it.”