Despite the pouring rain all day and the original task being cancelled, we still had 19 hardy goodgymers turn out for the last group run of 2025!

We are very grateful to Laura for stepping in last minute and finding us a wide array of jobs at Holgate Community Garden. We had budlea cutters, compost shifters, leaf sweepers and woodchip weeders.

We soon rattled through the jobs then ended with some Christmas themed tag, where you had to sing a line from a Christmas song to release the tagged reindeer/snowman/holly/santa.

It was then back to base led by Pete and thats it for this year... except the party on Friday!

As in previous years, we joined Rotary York Ainsty's Santa sleigh to provide some elves to go door-to-door collecting donations for York Mind. We were lucky that the temperature was a balmy 11 degrees this evening - much better than previous years' rain and very cold temperatures. The sleigh made its way through the streets of Woodthorpe, stopping regularly so that Santa (aka GG-er James) could have a chat and give out sweets to some of the local children. Lots of people had their cash ready for us and one chap gave us a small bag full of coins that he had collected. A lack of cash was not a barrier as, for the first time, one of our elves (Nick) had the York Mind card reader app on his phone so he could take card payments without people needing to go to the card reader with the sleigh. It was great fun to shout "Nick" and see him come running! We had a pleasant 2½ hours of collecting before returning to our start point, tired but feeling more in the Christmas spirit. We will find out later exactly how much we have collected - can we beat last year's total?