How the HCRJC Holiday Party Comes Together
By Isaac Lorton
Every year, for as long as anyone can remember, board member Kitty O’Hara puts together the Hartford Community Restorative Justice Center’s holiday party.
“I don’t even know when I started throwing the holiday party,” Kitty says with a laugh.
And throw a party she does. The 50 already-wrapped Yankee Swap gifts, decorations, silly hats and accessories, paper plates, napkins, utensils, even the to-go boxes, that’s all Kitty. She does it all – except for the food.
For Kitty’s Yankee Swap Ice-Breaking Extravaganza, she spends a majority of the year leading up to the event collecting items that she thinks will be good gifts, wrapping them, and storing them in a specific storage area in her home until the holiday party. Gesturing to some of the stacked boxes filled with the Yankee Swap gifts, Kitty says, “I don’t even know what’s in them.”
“Some of the things are funny, some of the things aren’t, but it’s a nice little icebreaker. It’s fun because people will usually fight over one particular thing. One year it was really weird. It was a croakie. Oh my God! You would have thought it was $100 or something. It went to so many different people. I’m like, ‘really? A croakie?’
“Another year, a couple months after the party, I was walking down the street and someone was like, ‘Hey! See this hat? I got that at the HCRJC yankee swap. I love my hat!’”
”I love giving gifts,” Kitty says. “And that’s the other thing: if I overhear somebody saying they need something, I’ll keep an eye out for it or go out and get it.”
Along with the Yankee Swap gifts, Kitty also helps put together gift bags for the Justice Center’s clients finding clothing, necessities, and other wants that are delivered on Christmas or Christmas Eve.
“For the gift bags, we get giant shopping bags and I get a list of all the names and sizes so I know what to buy – like jackets, sweatshirts and socks. It’s all practical things, basically. They each get a bag delivered in addition to what we do for the party.”
Kitty’s generosity is at the forefront of her approach to restorative justice, and the HCRJC Holiday Party is a reflection of that.
“It’s a thank you to our volunteers because they’re all invited. For our clients – a lot of them this is often the only Christmas party they’re going to have.” Kitty continued, “As far as the party itself, I encourage people to be goofy because we don’t want it to be serious. There’s one box that has a bunch of crazy hats and stuff. I usually put on something stupid. I have a singing hat, but I can’t wear it for very long because it’s really heavy and hurts my head. The top of it goes back and forth. It’s really obnoxious. I would love it if people would wear tacky sweaters and stuff. It’s just to get people to relax and have some laughs. Everything else in this world is too serious.”