To fit in with the holiday theme for last month the National Honor Society chose to visit the Primrose Old Folks Home to hand out Christmas cards and hand print wreaths to the elderly. Their goal was to be able to cheer up the elderly before the Christmas season.
Retirement homes have been viewed as a place that our elderly people get sent to and forgotten about, so The National Honor Society sought out to fix that. The two put in charge of leading the project to bring some holiday cheer to the old folks home were Calvin Kost and Josh Shrader.
When Participating in the National Honor Society members must have a certain amount of hours of community service, about 16 hours per year at least, to continue to stay with the program. This makes the members eager to get out into the community to help and provide, this also allows for more opportunities for the members as well. This could be anything like serving at the local rescue mission to helping pick up trash on the highway. “We’re doing humane society donations, dog treats, and we’re also bringing food to the homeless and food shelters,” said Kost.
One of the co-chair leaders for the old folks home visit was Calvin Kost. He helped plan and come up with the idea of “bringing some cheer” to the elderly there. “I feel like older people get forgotten about,” said Kost. “I think Ms. White and Ms. Howell wanted to spread it everywhere they could, and sometimes people don’t have anybody in those old folks’ homes so the old folk home was a good place to do it.”
Kost wasn’t the only one that helped plan the retirement home visit, Shrader was the other co-chair leader that helped plan out how the visit was going to go. He helped coordinate with the retirement home for when the best time would be to go and visit its residents. It wasn’t easy though. “The people in NHS are all super active so it was hard to find a time that a good amount of people could head over,” said Shrader.
Though the time spent preparing for and participating in a certain activity, like the old folks home visit, may have seemed daunting or unexciting, it is the experience of getting to hand out those handmade wreaths and handwritten Christmas cards that was the most memorable for the NHS. “It’s pretty difficult to live in a retirement home especially nowadays, the isolation is really bad and sometimes they don’t get visitors,” said Shrader. “So it was really nice to see that we made their days when we visited.”
