I want to thank our community for your support of The Mining Journal Cheer Club. You have come through with an overwhelming amount of support again this year.

We estimate that the Journal’s Cheer Club provided over 3,000 toys and gifts to families this Christmas. We also collected over $8,000 in cash to be given to families in need this Christmas season.

We added the St. Vincent de Paul Society this year as an important organization that provides help to people in need.

They helped over 560 children and 720 families this Christmas Season. The Salvation Army also served several hundred families again this year.

The Salvation Army distributed over 2,000 gifts in Marquette alone and then hundreds more to the Ishpeming Salvation Army.

St. Vincent De Paul and The Ishpeming Salvation Army also received toys from the Marine Corp Toys for Tots program and we also want to thank them for the contributions that they make to needy families.

All of us at the Journal are humbled by the community support of the Cheer Club. With your support we have been able to provide money and toys for 37 years to people in need in our community.

The Journal simply provides a service of being a drop off location for the toys and money. The success of the Cheer Club is directly related to the generous people that make the donations.

Once again your support was significant and you made Christmas possible for over 1,000 people that needed help. We hope that the generosity that you have shown helps warm your hearts as much as it has warmed our hearts to see the level of giving that you offered.

I am thankful to live and work in a community that is so willing to give to people in need. There may be other communities that are also very generous, but because I don’t see that support first hand, I want to say I think that people in the central Upper Peninsula are among the most generous people on earth.

Editor’s note: Jim Reevs is publisher of The Mining Journal.