As the holidays rolled in and everyone began to experience the giving spirit, New Life Church of Powell hosted their 4th annual Giving Tree.

“We started out with about fifteen families, but this year there’s a total of 26 families and an additional 11 children,” said Amy McLain, the children’s pastor. “We work with DFS and we don’t exactly know what the situations these families from but they’re families that have come to DFS for help so typically we help families that would otherwise do without around Christmas time.

“Some of the kids are in foster care or just being reunited with their moms and dads.”

The Giving Tree has been an event that has had much of the church help out and has been a great way to give back to the community.

“It’s amazing really, typically there’s 2-8 people per family and then each one of those people get at least four gifts; something they need or clothing items or something they want,” said McLain.  “If you add that all up it’s probably 500 to 600 gifts that come out of the church. I mean, the whole church just gets on board and it’s fun to watch people pick tags off the tree and try to decide what they want to buy.”

New Life also gets the church’s youth group involved in the activity.

“On wrapping day …  we have our youth group wrap the presents and we call that our youth group service project,” said McLain. “But so many of our other church members also come and wrap and hand out gifts.”

The church also gets to distributet the presents to the families.

“It’s always so much fun to hand out the gifts to everyone and see how happy they get,” said McLain with a large smile. “Everyone is just so happy.”

New Life wrapped and distributed presents on Dec. 22.