Santa delivers community support for grieving family

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Hutchison says the support she and her children have received since Andrew’s death has been incredible. 
 

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“I’m blown away by the generosity of the community,” she exclaims. “Thank you from the bottom of our hearts. Thank you.”

Hutchison says Andrew had been working in the oil and gas sector for about 14 years and was in Iraq since April of this year, describing him as a ‘people person’.

“He was genuine and loved everybody,” she explains. “He was easy to get along with.”

Shanna adds Andrew also had dreams of owning his own business and was ready to pursue them.

“He brewed his own beer in the garage and we were looking into starting a brewery in Red Deer,” states Hutchison. “We were talking to the banks and going to start writing up our business plan. He realized that his dream could become reality and so he was going to be taking steps to leave the oilfield and be home more.”

Carl Kalveram and Coreen Spencer of Sylvan Lake decided to help the young family by rallying community support for the Hutchisons.

It culminated Monday night with a visit to their home by Santa Claus (Kalveram) and an elf (Spencer) loaded with gifts.

Kalveram describes the experience as a rollercoaster of emotions.

“We’ve been collecting donations from businesses and other people,” he explains. “Any time we can get a donation, it’s a big emotional hit every time.”

Spencer agrees, saying everyone just wants to do something good for the family.

“They just needed someone to spearhead it,” states Spencer. “We call it the ripple effect, you do one little thing and all of these ripples come from it. It’s been a very emotional day as I’ve talked to a lot of business owners and people who have actually just contacted us because they wanted to do something, so it kind of melts our hearts.”

Kalveram and Spencer say this was just a small act of kindness by the community for a family that deserves and needs it right now, citing donations from businesses like Whispers Equine Learning, Peavey Industries, The Bra Lounge, Bruin’s Plumbing and Heating and Wrenchmasters among others.

Spencer adds the gifts collected for the Hutchison family are to help them well-beyond the Christmas season.

“When everybody else’s life goes back to normal, Shanna’s going to need some things to support her past this time,” she explains. “Right now it’s about the kids but we know that after Christmas, it needs to be for Shanna, for mom to be able to carry on and so we wanted to have things to support her. A strong mom is going to be stronger for her kids.”

Kalveram hopes others are now inspired to do random acts of kindness as well this Christmas.

“Coreen and I live in Sylvan Lake and we do little things for people there all the time,” states Kalveram . “This time it kind of snowballed from what we started originally to something very large and that’s a good thing.”