The National Honor Society brought the Gift of Love program to LZHS throughout the month of November so students can support families in need.

In the Gift of Love program, students sponsor a family or an individual listed on a paper mitten on the Christmas tree in the school’s cafeteria. The mitten lists a few items the family needs.  Students buy the gifts and drop them off in the school cafeteria on November 28, 29, or 30.

LZHS Gift of Love program will sponsor 14 families.

“I have been talking to the high school, and for ten years I have been grateful for the National Honor Society to continue the Gift of Love,” Barbara Haff, chairman of the Gift of Love program, said.

Students can not only participate in the Gift of Love program at the high school, but can also sponsor a family at St. Francis de Sales church in LZ, where Haff mainly works.  The church gave the National Honor Society the families to sponsor, so the high school could help St Francis with sponsoring all families.

“We have a chance of helping out between 1,600-1,800 people a year,” Haff said. “We have never had to turn a family away, and I hope we never have to, but we always need more sponsors.”

Emily Shaw was one of the students at LZHS that chose to participate in the Gift of Love program.

“I chose to do the Gift of Love because I have been lucky in the past, and I just wanted to give some of it back,” Emily Shaw, freshman, said.

There are, most of the time, Haff said, never enough sponsors for the needy families so some families do not receive what they need. In the past, families that were never sponsored received money and/or coats from coat drives and charity fundraisers, so Haff does not have to turn a family away with nothing.

“We have to follow the great law of love by loving our neighbor and to help them when they are in need,” David Ryan, priest of St. Francis de Sales church in LZ, said.