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By hosting gifts for the “Santa for One Day ” project, we donate festive joy

01. 12. 2023

The Santa for One Day project is a real fairy tale about how everyone can contribute a small drop to a story that becomes as big as the entire sea of goodness.

Every fairy tale begins with “once upon a time.”
And once upon a time, one fine day in December, a group of friends decided to give presents to some children. They didn’t know exactly what they were getting into, but they wanted to brighten up the festive winter season for the children and their parents. A small garage as storage, a personal car for delivery… But a few dozen gifts have grown into tens of thousands of gifts in all these years of duration of the project, and every year the smiles multiply.

The idea behind theSanta for one dayproject is simple: volunteers register on the website, choose a socially disadvantaged child from the list, find out his/her age and gender, take a shoebox, decorate it, fill it with gifts and take it to one of the collection points. In this way, they help to provide for the socially less fortunate.

The idea for the project was inspired by an organisation where the campaign’s leader, Mrs. Savina Goličnik, worked while volunteering in South Africa, helping children from poor areas of Capetown. It was this experience that propelled the Slovenian Christmas campaign. “I was curious about what was going on with the organisation I was working for and I saw on their website that they were involved in the Santa shoebox project. I looked into what it was all about and was immediately intrigued by the idea of shoebox giving.” In the far south of Africa, more than 900 organisations have joined forces to give presents to around 100.000 socially disadvantaged children every year, and the Santa Clauses are mostly children, because they in this way, they want to introduce them to the joy of giving.

The project soon fully came to life in Slovenia as well. In the first year, there were around 200 Santa Clauses, but interest and the number of gift recipients grew almost exponentially. This year, there are already over 11,000 Santa Clauses, and approximately 13,800 gifts will be given.

Santa has a lot of work to do this year... but also many diligent helping-hands to come to his aid.

The Santa for One Day project is completely non-profit and run entirely by volunteers. It takes a huge amount of planning and resources to make it successful, for which the volunteers often dig into their own pockets, or which are covered by voluntary contributions. The biggest challenge is the distribution and delivery of the gifts to the recipients across Slovenia and even across borders. That is why the organization will happily accept good people who are ready to help after 15. December, when the collection of boxes ends. We are pleased that Boscarol Ltd. was able to come to the rescue and offer the Santas a large enough hall where they can store the presents for a whole month free od charge, during the difficult sorting process.

The vacant 2000 m2 hall in the former Žito building in Ljubljana became the home of gifts for the lucky recipients.