By Mikayla van Loon
The generosity of one great grandmother will ripple through the Lilydale and Mount Evelyn community over Christmas despite her distance.
Former Mount Evelyn resident Ann Watts, nee Dean, collected over 100 items of clothing and shoes which were donated to the Rotary Club of Lilydale’s Wishing Tree project.
“My mum lives in Warrnambool and she’s been very unwell. So she decided this year, instead of giving her grandchildren and great grandchildren big gifts, when she saw clothes on sale she thought, ‘right, I’m going to start collecting them and at the end of the year give them to families,’” Ann’s daughter Amanda Ball said.
“Because it’s so hard economically for families at the moment, she collected them all, wrapped them up and wanted to give them to families in need to help support the community.”
Living in the hillside suburb as a single mum during the 1960s, Ann knew the challenges then of financially providing and wanted to do her part to make it that bit easier for others.
Getting the entire family involved, Ann, 79, travelled from Warrnambool to Wonga Park with Amanda’s children and grandchildren gathering to help wrap the presents.
“My daughter-in-laws and my sons came over and they all started at six and they kept going through until 11,” Amanda said.
“Then the next day they even offered to do more, writing the tags because my mum said ‘if you’re going to give a gift, you’ve got to give it right’.”
The tags outlined what was in the gift and the sizes, so it could be given to the right people.
Telling Amanda that “you never forget where you come from”, Ann was reflecting on the challenges of raising three children on her own.
“She said ‘in my time, I would have loved somebody to just drop a parcel off at my door but I wasn’t going to ask anyone for help, everyone else was struggling around me’.”
Sharing in the spirit of giving, Amanda said not only was it incredible of her mum to do what she did, it was a beautiful thing for the family to be involved in.
“It was so beautiful. Would I do it again? Probably I got more out of doing this than I have wrapping presents for family in a normal routine.
“To know that when you’re wrapping this gift, somebody’s going to open it, their child’s going to open it and think, ‘Wow’. I could imagine that family, whoever it is, would go ‘oh my gosh, thank you so much’.
“You could feel it in the air, that the families will just be so grateful that it was one less thing they had to worry about at Christmas.”
Wanting her and her children to follow in her mother’s footsteps, Amanda said it may not be the same project next year but she would like to give back in some way.
“It’ll be a great example for everyone, just to give one less present and put it in a basket.”
With Amanda being the manager of Cire’s early learning centres, Ann was able to donate to the Rotary via a present collection box at the centre.
To offer their thanks to Ann for her generosity, knowing that families in their Mount Evelyn community may be supported, the staff at Cire hosted a morning tea for her.
“She said she has never really had such a warm thank you. She was just so overwhelmed by the way they care and they showed her appreciation.
“She said out of all what she’s done in her life, the centre, what they did for her with the morning tea, she was so humbled by the way they cared so much.”
As someone who has done “so much charity work in her life”, Amanda said once she’d donated the wrapped gifts and seen her family, Ann went back home.
“In Warrnambool, they have these bags and they get delivered to every house and you fill it with non-perishable food and somebody comes to pick them up,” Amanda said.
“That’s what she had to do, that’s what she had to get back for to make sure she could go shopping and to make sure she could fill up a bag of food to be collected.
“I said ‘you could get your neighbour to do that’ and she said ‘no, then it wouldn’t be coming from me’.”
