Good morning, good morning, Welcome, welcome, welcome. Media's time now for our community connection right here on K one, the one you trust, and we're talking with our representatives here for Play for Bird Foundation and we have a tighter Backlaw and Clint Hansen in studio here with us. We've got a very special event coming out. Let's start with you Tyler.
First of all, welcome, Thanks Tom, appreciate you allowing us to be here today. It's a great day, sunshine, and we're here to talk about the Festival of Nativity that's coming up this weekend. It's starting. It's at Father Lynch Hall at Saint John's School, which is at eighth and Keeler, starting tomorrow morning.
At nine am.
It's an event open to the public, free no charge. We want to invite the entire community surrounding area to start their Christmas holiday off by coming to the Festival in Nativity and what that is. This is our fourteenth year that we've done this. It's our ninth year that we've done it at Father Lynch. So if people are
familiar with it, they know all about it. But if they're new to the community or they haven't heard of it before, we basically have every year we open up Father Lynch Hall, we decorate the facility to represent i would say, a Christmas wonderland. But then people of the community temporarily donate their nativity sets that they keep in their homes at this Christmas time. Now that Thanksgivings out of the way and they're starting to decorate their homes
for Christmas. This weekend, everybody is bringing in their nativities and we put those on display as a centerpiece to start off the Christmas holiday. We're talking over right now. We have over five hundred displays donated by almost one
hundred different individuals throughout the community. So this is a large participation event, and so people that come to visit are going to walk into Father Lynch Hall and they are going to see nativities from all over the world made from every different type of material pretty much that
you can imagine, in formats that you can imagine. It really is meant to tie different parts of the world all onto that center point of what Christmas is, which is the birth of Jesus Christ and his significance in our spiritual lives and our eternal realm. So the Foundation started this to basically kick off the Christmas Holiday the right way, which is focusing on the birth of Christ. So this starts tomorrow Friday from nine am to eight pm.
It goes Saturday at the same time nine am to eight pm, and then on Sunday nine am to five pm before we'll wrap it up for to let everybody else enjoy the nativities back in their homes.
Clint probably never looks the same way twice whenever they.
Get this all set up.
No, no, not at all. So I live out in Utah now, and I flew in last night. I come out. I put this on my.
Calendar every year. Year.
Every year I marked this off and make sure that I can get out here. And as I came in last night, you know they're decorating and putting everything up, and I.
Said, guys, this is just like a painting. Every year.
It's a little bit different, a few different breaststrokes here and there, and you'll see that we've.
Done something a little different in the.
Hall this year. I won't give the I won't give it away. You got to come see it. But I walked in and was like, WHOA, that looks really good. That's an awesome addition to everything. And so just come see it. It is a little bit different this year, but there's still a lot of the same nativities.
I was looking at one. I said, hey, that's a new one.
They said, no, that one's been here every year, and I was like, wait, I swear that I looked at each one of these every year and have taken pictures of all of them. But you can come every year and see something different. Also depends on where you're at in your spiritual journey. I mean, where's your mind, where's your heart? What are you looking for? And you can see different things. Maybe certain nativities will talk to you this year that didn't talk to you last year.
That's amazing.
That's a great way to put it too. So folks make sure you get after it this weekend. It's being put on for the play for Burke Foundation. The local foundation has been going strong for a few years now. I tell us a little bit about the foundation.
Yeah, it's almost ten years now. Burke was our son.
We lived here, you know, lived here from twenty ten to twenty nineteen. And Burke passed away in twenty fifteen, so April fourth, twenty.
Fifteen, and so it'll be ten years.
And you know, it's one of those things that we started to fill the whole that was in our life and our heart. And so how do we help give back to the community and support the youth that were affected by our son's passing. And so it's been a great thing for the community. People come together. The money that we raised goes back into the youth of the community. Any money we raised from the Nativity festival goes in to get Christmas gifts for kids that are in need
here in town. We actually have some raffle nativities that I brought. Come come asking about the story of trying to get one through my carry on. I have a story there too, but you have to come ask.
Right there.
I got to Yeah, So the raffle tickets are five bucks each or five tickets for twenty But then all of that money goes to you know, we work with Tyler and Kyle and we pick out some organizations in town that have children in need and then we go help them get Christmas gifts for those kids so they can have Christmas this year and have something to unwrap under the tree on Christmas morning.
So there there's a couple other things with it. Like we said, this is free to the public to come and experience the nativities. But we do have a fundraising component to as Clint said, to buy Christmas presents for underprivileged kids, and Kyle Pool and I are working with
the school district as well as some other nonprofits. We also have point sets, and this year we're partnering with a company out of Vanbera in Arkansas that sells point set is to nonprofits at a better price so that we can in turn sell those point sets and gain a little bit of money so that we can use that to buy for these underprivileged kids. This is our sixth year. I believe in buying presents for children, and I can tell you every year it doesn't get any easier.
One thing that I've always said is that most of us that are listening, we've probably got Christmas trees up, or we've got them prepared to get up. And we know that our Christmas morning, we're going to wake up with family and friends, and we're going to sit there
and we're going to go through our traditional Christmas event. Sadly, we don't recognize that there is a large number of children in our community today that will wake up on December twenty fifth and will probably be one of the worst days of their lives because they know everybody else have trees and have presents awaiting them. To them, it's just another day that they know everybody else is enjoying, and they're waking up wondering.
Are they going to have food? Are they going to have enough warmth?
And so when we get Christmas lists from like Martinsville schools, where we work with the administrators to identify children, you know, and what their needs are. The list that we get are simple stuff. They need a blanket, they need a coat, they need socks, stuff that yes, I mean to us, it's stuff that we would go and buy without a
second pot. To them, it's a prayer that they hope that they can that somebody will open up their heart to supply them because of the circumstances that they're unfortunately in. And so the Foundation, the play for Burke Foundation, we feel that that's part of our calling when it comes to the youth of the city and surrounding area Barsville, is what can we do to help them out? And that's why when we first started working on the Festival the Nativity, we determined, you know, this is a great
way for people to remember what Christmas is about. But then we realized, hey, through our nonprofit, we can go and raise funds to help kids at this Christmas time. So again today Saturday and Sunday nine to eight.
And Sunday nine to five open.
To the public.
Eighth and Keeler.
We also have a concert, a free concert going on Saturday at one o'clock at the St. Catholics Church at their main hall. And so if you really if you're coming downtown on Saturday, maybe going shopping or to lunch, put on your calendar at one o'clock to finish your lunch and go over and hear a beautiful Christmas concert.
I want to thank you gentlemen for coming in Clint. I will be there to hear your story about trying to get Nativity through security at the airport.
It's top maybe Jesus at security and said he can't come through, so to be to be continued to continue about.
It, oh my gosh, oh my gosh. We thank you very much. It is playing for Burke Foundation and it's the the Festival of Nativity.
Coming up this week. And thank you gentlemen.
Thank you jolks you've been watching and listening to our community connection,