With your messages and cards, your quilts and chocolates, your teddy bears and caftans, your scarves and mittens, your love and caring, your sketches and lotions, you are filling the Mansion and its people with love and light. There is such a thing as Christmas Cheer, and at the Mansion, it is visible everywhere – on the three bulletin boards filled with your messages, in the letters the residents proudly show to on another, and in the smiles and light in their eyes.

Tonight, Maria and I went out to dinner at a local restaurant called Salvano’s, and Morgan, who works at the Mansion full-time, was waiting on us, she works at the restaurant two nights a week. She came up to Maria and to me and she said she just wanted me to know how much the messages and gifts pouring into the Mansion mean to the people who live there.

Some of the residents rarely get visits or contacts from the outside world. The holidays are an especially difficult time for them, and it means the world, she said, that people are writing to them and taking notice of them, it makes them feel alive, and human, and part of a community of people that many have left behind.

We send the elderly away, we deprive them of the foundations of human contact, your wonderful and creative efforts at reaching out to them have transformed their lives. I see it and hear it and Morgan was eloquent about it. The lives of the staff have been brightened as well.

What a Christmas it will be at the Mansion, Morgan said, people are so excited.

One daughter of a resident called up to say her mother sounded happier than she had her in years, she was so excited that Red comes to see her and she loves being with him.

Our friend Peggy walks around with a fistful of letters, reading them to everyone she meets. Connie was so moved by the weaving patterns she received, she is making mittens for some of the residents.

“You and your readers should know what you have done,” she said, “it means so much to us, we read the letters to each other, post them on bulletin boards, we are getting games and cookies, it has changed our lives and brought so much happiness and love here. You just can’t know.”

I see it and hear it and feel it, but hearing it from Morgan, a loving and generous person who loves her work, is especially powerful. I hope my words and photographs do justice to the wonderful work you are doing, Morgan said your gifts and messages prove that there are many good people in the world and they wish to do good. Thanks, thanks, thanks.

I am going to the Mansion with Red tomorrow, photos and words to come.

If you wish to send messages or gifts to the residents of the Mansion, you can write to The Mansion, 11 S. Union Street, Cambridge, N.Y., 12816. Some of the residents are avid readers, they seem to love mysteries and romance novels.