The “gift registry” mentioned in another comment reminds me of the Secret Santa and Angel Tree events that get set up locally during December. Is there anything similar where you’re at?

I’m sure it happens here but I’m really not invested in Christmas because I’m pretty doggedly atheist and if they do this stuff then my guess is that it happens mostly through association groups or malls and shit, and I avoid malls like the plague lol. I also suspect that these Angel Tree type events would probably target a demographic that is a notch or two above the poverty level that the mutual aid org I’m associated with works to serve. We definitely get the working poor types who are just barely scraping by but a whole lot of the people we see are more like what you’d see at Skid Row – lots of people who are really down on their luck.

I think in future it would be cool to branch out and engage with other Angel Tree operations but at the moment the org is mostly focused on the weekly push to get everything together and it doesn’t have much capacity to organise beyond that. Because of the classist attitude here it’ll be a bit of a tougher sell because we see a lot of people who are outside of that “respectable poor” category and there are a lot of people we see who struggle with addiction and serious mental illness and really harsh poverty so it means that a mall or a bank isn’t going to want anything to do with someone like that because they only want the “deserving poor” types.