Santa Claus made a special appearance Friday night in Morrison.
Actually, make that two Santa Clauses, two Mrs. Clauses and two elves, riding in firetrucks and delivering bag after bag of toys to nearly 150 children through the Morrison Fire Department’s Caring for Our Community Toy Drive.
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The toys and donations to support the program were collected over the past several months. As that was happening, Morrison School District families received information from their schools about the annual toy distribution and were invited to sign up. All Morrison students can sign up to receive toys.
“This is 100% from the community,” Morrison Fire Chief Rob Vegter said of the donations as loaded-up trucks were preparing for their stops Friday night. An in-town route map listed 60 stops, with four more outside of town. The firefighters said it would take about two hours to get through the list of deliveries.
The toy drive got its start about 15 years ago after former Morrison Fire Chief Dave Benters proposed the idea, firefighters said. The drive is organized by a three-member committee, with donations gift-wrapped the previous week, separated into bags for each stop and packed into trucks and trailers for Friday night’s distribution.
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