(Seguin) — One of the most important segments of the community is not going unnoticed this Christmas. At least not for Santa Sheriff, a.k.a. Guadalupe County Sheriff Arnold Zwicke. For the last decade, Zwicke has helped deliver care packages to all nursing home residents in Guadalupe County.
Just this past week, Santa Sheriff and his team of elves delivered gifts to five nursing homes. However due to the COVID-19 pandemic, visitors including Santa Sheriff were still not allowed inside the facilities. Zwicke says although he was again unable to dress up in the Santa suit and provide caroling for the residents, he was grateful to have again provided them gifts.
“This year’s Sheriff Santa program, we were able to deliver to 482 residents throughout Guadalupe County. The unfortunate thing which is understandable due to COVID, we were not allowed to go into the building again and do the full deal like we do – the singing of Christmas carols, Santa with the pictures with the residents and stuff but it was still an awesome deal,” said Zwicke.
Gift items included but were not limited to blankets, cups, hairbrushes and non-slip socks.
Zwicke says this program remains special to him and is grateful to the community for providing donations to this much deserving group.
“We’ve been involved with Seguin PD. They’ve asked us to come on board with Blue Santa and that has been a good thing so 10 years ago, we decided to look for other things to help and we came up with the idea of the rest homes. There’s a lot of residents that don’t have anyone unfortunately. So, we want to bring a little cheer to their Christmas as well so that’s how we go started. We had a garage sale over at the Justice Center parking garage and raised money. Individuals from the Sheriff’s Office here donated. Citizens donated. Walgreens, Walmart, everybody and as time went on, we started getting the donations. They got bigger and bigger, and a lot of groups are helping us with that,” said Zwicke.
The list of nursing homes receiving Sheriff Santa gifts include Windsor Nursing, GVNC, Remarkable, Nesbit, Walnut Springs and Autumn Winds in Schertz.