Season of Giving

Busch’s, FM 107, and Food Gatherers are conducting their annual “Rockin’ for the Hungry” food drive at the South Main grocery this weekend. Busch’s makes it easy to donate by offering grocery bags (right) that are pre-filled with appropriate canned and dried goods. For $10, you get $17 worth of food that you simply drop off with the volunteers on your way out.

With the radio station broadcasting live ("we're freezin' for a reason") from the store’s porte cochere, they’ve gathered over 120 tons of food as of lunchtime Saturday. April and Erin are volunteers from the Culinary Arts program at WCC – they were loading a second truck, and counted over 20 skids in the big trailer!


(Sung to the melody of “Jingle Bell Rock”)
Tags for all
Have a ball
Tag Days are here.
Donate to us, and bring kids some cheer
Good cheer is coming, to all the sick kids
Innn Mott, and Wash-te-naw!
It’s the ri-ght time
To make a beee line,
And grab a tag from us.
Tag Days is to-day
Don’t let it get a-way
Without helping out ALL those kids!

Singing with gusto, Jon and Stefan are second -year medical students at the U. Jon and another student, Ajay, “doctored” the lyrics in honor of the annual Galens Tag Days fundraiser. Galens is the University of Michigan Medical School’s honor society, and since 1927 they've raised funds for local children’s charities every year in December.

Donate money into the Galens’ bucket and you receive the eponymous tag to hang on your coat, thus able to proceed about your holiday excursions guilt-free and unharassed. This year they’re raising money for several different worthy causes, including the Corner Clinic and a playroom at the new Mott’s building.

(My love affair with malapropisms started early, and back in college I thought “Galens Tag” was some sort of Ann Arbor/German thing, akin to “guten tag.”)

These two young men clearly pulled one of the primo locations in town to solicit – right in front of Great Harvest Bread Company. Benefiting from free bread and hot cocoa courtesy of GHB, Jon and Stefan told me that the “Happy Van” fortifies all the volunteers. It’s supplied and driven by supportive med school faculty, and there’s even a song for when the Happy Van arrives…

(Sung to the melody of “Here Comes Santa Claus”)
Here comes Happy Van
Here comes Happy Van
Right down South Main Street
Careening over curb, and loaded with snacks and
Other things unnamed.
Look at the wa-cky fa-cul-ty, with smiles so happy and bright.
Keep it pouring into my mug, and maybe I’ll survive the night…