RiverView Health’s Auxilliary Sewing Club is welcoming newborns born at RiverView in December with their annual giant stockings called Santa Socks, along with many other holiday-themed items for patients to purchase at the RiverView Health Gift Shop.
According to RiverView Sewing Club Head Deb Normandin, RiverView Health has been making Santa Socks for newborns as far back as the 1960s and has been an annual tradition for the club every year. She explained that every year, the RiverView Nursery requests the club to create several socks that will be needed for the nursery in the summer, which the club begins working on in September to have ready by December. “All new babies that are born in the month of December go home in a Santa Sock. This year, the nursery requested 14 new Santa Socks, but we’ve been doing them well before that,” Deb Normandin explained. “I’ve been a part of the Sewing Club for about five to six years, and every year we do these for December. We start sewing in August, and they’re ready by December.” All families whose baby have had a stocking and blanket made for them get to take them home with their baby, which many families have kept decades later.
The Sewing Club has made much more than stockings this year for the holiday season. It has created many other items as a part of a fundraiser for the RiverView Health Auxiliary to go towards items and equipment requested by different departments. “We put out a call for grants that different departments can apply for, and it will be for some piece of equipment that they would like to have,” Sewing Club member Nancy Capistran explained. “Then the Auxiliary raises the funds and pays for it.” Some of the items they’ve created include aprons (including Mommy and Me apron sets for $30) for $16, table toppers and placemats for $20, lap robes, and seven tide blankets for the RiverView Memory Care. Along with those items, the Auxiliary still has 32 items available to be bid on from its Cookie Walk and Silent Auction Surge that was held on Tuesday, December 6. All items in the Silent Auction and made by the Sewing Club will be available for people to bid on in the RiverView Gift Shop until Thursday, December 8, before going back into the RiverView Conference Rooms 1-3 on Friday, December 9 until 3:00 p.m. “The sale goes on until 4:00 p.m. today,” Deb Normandin explained. “After that, the Silent Auction items and aprons will go to the Gift Shop, so they can come in anytime at the Gift Shop between 9:00 a.m. and 4:00 p.m. and take a look.” If any of the aprons or other items the Sewing Club created aren’t purchased at the end of this week, they will be available for people to purchase at RiverView’s Gift Shop until Christmas.
