Donated hand-crafted ornaments bring Christmas cheer to Okanagan families who lost homes to wildfires

Annick DeGooyer wasn't going to decorate for Christmas this year.

In August, the home where she and her firefighter husband Rob Baker had lived more than 20 years was reduced to ashes when a huge wildfire tore through their community of Traders Cove on the west side of Okanagan Lake.

The couple now rent in Kelowna and no longer have a treasure trove of decorations to pull out at this time of year.

That is, until last week, when DeGooyer and Baker received a thoughtful package that put them in the festive spirit.

The couple were nominated as recipients in the "Christmas Love for the Okanagan" project, a volunteer-led effort to make and distribute boxes of ornaments to more than a hundred families in the Okanagan and Shuswap area that lost their homes to wildfires last summer.

"When I opened the box, I didn't think it was going to hit me quite as hard as it did," said DeGooyer. "All the ornaments had a tag of the person who made them and so, as I opened the box, it was such a personal experience."

She says she told Baker they'd better get a tree.

"These ornaments can't go back in the box," she recalls telling her husband. "They are just beautiful."

Paying it forward

The project's origin story begins in Slave Lake, Alta., in 2011 after a wildfire in May of that year levelled hundreds of homes.

Tammy Torgerson, who helped organize the project this year in the Okanagan, says the idea came from her sister-in-law Trina Vercholuk, whose family lost everything in the Slave Lake fire and relocated to the B.C. Interior in 2016.

Vercholuk received a box of ornaments from a friend who organized a similar initiative in Slave Lake. Then, after devastating wildfires hit Fort McMurray, Alta., in 2016, people in Slave Lake helped get ornaments to families affected by that disaster.

Torgerson said she and Vercholuk started this year's initiative in September.

"That first Christmas when you go to reach for those ornaments and they are not there — how heartbreaking it is," Torgerson told CBC's Daybreak South.

"We recruited crafters from across the country and lots of schoolchildren to replace some of those memories in those boxes."

Christmas Love for the Okanagan volunteers used social media to recruit ornament-makers and solicit nominations from the community for households in need. Elementary school students in Slave Lake and Kelowna were among those to heed the call, as did artisans as far away as Nova Scotia.

"These are handmade ornaments — so, ornaments that people took the time, knew that these families were struggling and contributed," said Torgerson.

As of Dec. 1, more than 2,000 ornaments had been collected this year.

DeGooyer nominated numerous families she knew, as well as local firefighters who fought to save what they could. Her husband is among 13 members of the Wilson's Landing Fire Department who lost their homes to the McDougall Creek wildfire.

She recently took a bunch of ornament boxes to a firefighter appreciation event and gave them to their families.

"That was even more special," she said, comparing giving to receiving.

The project's social media site is filled with outpourings of appreciation from people who have already received their special packages.

Torgerson said they are still looking for the names of the owners of eight homes (two in Kelowna and six in Lake Country) that were destroyed.

She is hoping someone will email xmasloveokanagan@gmail.com if they know who these wildfire survivors are so they can be gifted a box of Christmas joy before Santa arrives this year.