Sisters give back to the village

Every Christmas, sisters Mary Testa and Maureen Remy have certain things they do. They buy gifts for their families, they decorate their homes and they help make sure that some 80 needy Rockville Centre families have a holiday to celebrate.

Each year for the past dozen years or so, the sisters have filled their homes with donated gifts and spent the weeks leading up to Christmas delivering them to the needy families on their lists. “I just don’t know what [Christmas] would be without it in this house,” said Remy. “I left for a year — we moved to Chicago. And we literally didn’t know what to do. We really missed it, because that’s what our holiday is about.”

Each year, starting soon after Thanksgiving, Testa and Remy head out to community groups — the St. Agnes Outreach Center, the Hispanic Brotherhood, the Economic Opportunity Council — to identify families in need. When Remy began adopting families with a friend, before getting her sister involved, their operation involved around 10 families. At its peak, the sisters were overseeing the collection and distribution of gifts to 90 families.

“Last year, given the economy, we told the Hispanic Brotherhood and St. Agnes Outreach and the EOC that we needed to limit it because we were afraid we wouldn’t get the volunteers,” Testa said. “We were pleasantly surprised that people were still willing to help even though the economy wasn’t so great. So this year we’re a little more confident -- we’re thinking we’re probably going to get in that 80 number again.”

Testa and Remy don’t buy gifts for all of the families themselves. They work more as organizers and overseers, and people who want to adopt a family contact them and are given a list of first names of family members. (Testa and Remy are the only ones who know the names of the families, so as to minimize any embarrassment they might feel.)

They contact all of the families beforehand and get pant, shirt and shoe sizes. Each family member also tells them about one or two personal items they would like, and about toys for the kids. The wish lists are then given to the adopting families.