Years ago, when Urbancasual.ca was a brand new website (February 2018), a local business called ‘Winters Photographics’ hosted a Giving Tree in their store each holiday season.

The purpose of this tree was to help Cochranites who needed some extra help at Christmas, with its tags filled with items for a much needed wish list.

Anyone could enter the store to take a tag from the tree and return with its item unwrapped, to be donated to the Cochrane Activettes Share Your Christmas Campaign. Families enjoyed choosing the tags and shopping for these items together.

Then Winters Photography decided it was time they retire, so they asked us if we’d take on the Giving Tree?

We of course said yes, and the rest is history! But we didn’t have a storefront to host the tree, so we needed some help with this and asked local businesses to host a small tree (or put up their own!), and to be a designated tag pick-up and drop-off donation location in Cochrane for the duration of the program.

LAST year we had trees at the SLS Centre, Cochrane Floors & More, The Social Spot Cochrane, Cabeza Grande & F45 Cochrane, and saw our LARGEST amount of tags taken & donations returned ever!