As we close in on the holiday season, our

Kiwanis Club is getting busy serving our kids and the community.

Diane Tandy-Guerrero chaired and planned the Halloween Carnival and Pat Bennett-Forman supplied the signs making sure everyone knew the carnival moved to the Village Green Community Center. The whole club came together to make it a great success.

Our Apple Cup food drive was rewarding, fun and well appreciated by the local food banks. There’s still a question on whether the Cougar or Husky supporters collected the most food.

The next thing to look forward to is our annual Santa’s Workshop, 1-4 p.m. Dec. 2 at the Kingston Cove Yacht Club. Thanks to Commodore Jerry Kirchner for allowing us to use the club. Santa and Mrs. Claus and our local elves from Kingston High School Key Club will be handing out goodies. The head elf will be taking pictures of the whole family, including pets, with Santa.

As usual, we have very interesting speakers at our meetings, thanks to Rick Eveleth’s efforts to get people to talk at 7 a.m. A local resident by the name of Skip Junis, who really cares about keeping Kingston beautiful, discussed what we all can do by keeping track and being pro-active about all the litter that seems to be increasing around town. One problem of being a ferry town is non-local people seem to throw out quite a bit of trash when leaving the ferry. I am a member of the yacht club, which cleans up 104 between the old Kingston Lumber site to Hansville Road. We have truckloads of trash each time we do the cleanup, and our Kiwanis Club cleans up between the ferry and the lumber yard. These are good community projects, but his point was that we all should be good citizens and remind people when they litter they are not doing Kingston any favors.

Our Kiwanis Club works with the Rotary Club on many projects, and one of our members, Pat Bennett-Forman, was recently honored by Rotary International with the Paul Harris Fellowship. This recognizes Pat for all the years she worked with children in the reading and math programs at Wolfle Elementary School. Her dedication and management ability made the program very successful and rewarding for the kids and volunteers alike; I was one of them.

Nancy McClellan, who works with the fire department and is a certified safety instructor, spoke about a very important subject for anyone that has children, grandchildren and any young members in their family: How to safely install car seats. It has always been a trick for me to make sure they are in properly. She also discussed the proper way to make sure you install the seats in the proper place in your car. If you have questions about how to do the installation, the fire department holds classes on how to do it properly.

We are really growing each week; it seems at each meeting we have a new member. That’s great and allows us to support our kids and community with more programs. If you would like to know more about Kiwanis, contact President Rob Shoaf, 907-306-7611, Membership Chair Jenn Menne, 360-626-3743; or me, Bob Lee, 360-509-9752.

Thanks, and have a good Kiwanis day.

— Bob Lee writes Kingston Kiwanis for Kingston Community News. Contact him at glen carin@aol.com.