Christmas Caroling for the Food Pantry

This is a fun easy activity to do during the holidays that gets the neighborhood involved and helps those in need.  I'm from a big family, and as a kid my Aunt would take my siblings and me around the neighborhood singing Christmas carols at the top of our lungs.  We didn't go up to people's houses just sing while walking around the neighborhood.  The Girl Scouts in this area has what is called Sing for their Supper and it's easy to adapt so that the kids in your neighborhood or your family can help out the needy as well.  Here are the basics of what you need:

• a flyer saying when you are going to come a-Caroling and who you are doing it for, Try Feeding America for a food bank near you.
• Bags - we re-use grocery bags
• Stapler
• Song books for everyone - and they do need the books because halfway through we all forget the words
• Wagon - we've done it without a wagon and it's not easy.
• Hot Chocolate

Some of the collection for the food bank from caroling this weekend

1. The week before staple the flyer to the bags.
2. Hand the bags out.  In our experience 25 bags is about 1 hour of caroling.  Remember not everyone will be home.  Some people leave the bag full on the doorstep.  We just take these bags.  We don't carol at these houses.
3. The day has arrived, GO CAROLING!  We usually sing one song and then the we ask ... in exchange for our singing if they could donate an item from their pantry.  Sometimes when the person goes to get the food - we'll sing something short like We Wish You a Merry Christmas.
4. When all done, go home and drink hot chocolate :)
5. Deliver the collected food to food bank.

Some Tips
A wagon is useful to hold the food.  Canned foods get heavy.  We had a runner, who every few houses that we collected food would run back to the house and drop the food off then catch up to the rest of us.  The rest of us would continue to sing.

We brought some shopping bags with us on our caroling adventure for the loose items when the neighbors did not have their bag.

We pretty much stuck to 5 basic songs.  We tried some Hanukkah songs but I would only suggest it if you know your neighbor is Jewish.  If you don't know, Jingle Bells and Winter Wonderland are always great non-religious winter songs.  I must say most of the time we didn't know the religion and we just sang whatever the kids choose.  I never had anyone get upset over what we sang.  Only once did we get a request of a different song and she wasn't upset, just wanted a different song.

 The houses with kids are the ones that are more likely to get everyone to gather around the door to listen.

Be sure to sing from the book, my version of a song and the kids are not always the same.