Christmas Gift Appeal 2026 – Be Part of The Story
The Christmas countdown is on! Following the success of our 2025 gift collection, we’re delighted to be launching our 2026 Christmas gift campaign.
To mark the nationwide Year of Reading, we are partnering with The Avenues Youth Project to distribute books to children and young people aged 8 - 18 living in North Paddington and attending our local primary and secondary schools.
With so much of young people's lives spent on screens, a book offers something different, a chance to slow down, use their imagination and get lost in a story. We're delighted to be part of the Christmas Book Drive and to help more children and young people discover the joy of reading.
In 2025, you collected and wrapped 650 gifts for Westminster families in our gift drive organised in collaboration with Westminster City Council’s Health Navigator team. To enable us to provide every regular attendee to Avenues Youth Club and children from their key partner schools with a brand new book, our 2026 wish list requires 950 books to be purchased.
There are encouraging findings from the National Literacy Trust’s Annual Literacy Survey 2026 that children and young people’s reported enjoyment of reading and daily reading habits have increased for the first time in five years. However, the survey still only reported 1 in 5 children aged 8 – 18 as reading daily in their free time and just over a third of children enjoy reading for pleasure.
There is documented evidence to support the far-reaching benefits of reading for children and young people; helping them to understand other viewpoints and develop empathy, spark imagination and creativity, build confidence, support wider classroom learning and reduce levels of stress and anxiety.
The Department for Education’s Year of Reading launched in March 2026 to align with World Book Day; in response to children and young people’s reading enjoyment and frequency being reported at an all-time low in 2025. Since March, Grand Union companies have given over 350 hours of volunteer time to deliver 600 individual one-to-one reading sessions with children. Our book-based Christmas collection is a wonderful next chapter in this story.
How to support our 2026 Christmas gift campaign
Buy a Book
To ensure the books received are appropriate, accessible and culturally sensitive, we’ve created a dedicated wish list in collaboration with colleagues at The Avenues Youth Project and their partner schools. We appreciate that you may have your own childhood favourites, but to ensure suitability and to help ease the huge distribution operation that will follow this campaign, we would be grateful if you could purchase from the wish list.
- Go to our Gift Registry to reserve a present – this helps us know how many books have been bought.
- Follow the link to Amazon and order the book to your address (or even better, pick up the item from your local book shop.)
- Drop off your unwrapped book at one of our designated donation points or sign up to volunteer and bring your book on the day.
Donation Points
Donation points will open on Monday 23 November at the locations listed below. Please do not wrap your book, as all donations will need to be checked for suitability prior to being gift wrapped.
Donation points will close at 5pm on Tuesday 8 December, ready for items to be sorted, ready for wrapping on Thursday 10 December.
- One Kingdom Street
- 3 Sheldon Square
- Novotel Paddington
- The Point
Join our team of volunteer elves
Put on your best Christmas jumper and join us at Visa’s offices on Thursday 10 December as we turn up the Christmas tunes and take on the challenge of wrapping all the donated books.
There are three volunteering slots available with a maximum capacity of 50 volunteers in each time slot.
Ninety minutes of volunteering awaits that is guaranteed to leave you in the Christmas spirit!
For more information about our Christmas campaign or the wider work of the Community Programme, please don’t hesitate to contact the team.