MARENGO COUNTY – Two outstanding services recently joined forces to see as many children as possible have a merry Christmas this year. The Tombigbee Emergency Medical Service delivered an ambulance full of toys Thursday to the Linden Department of Human Resources. The toys were part of TEM’S Toybox, a project that provides underprivileged children with gifts for Christmas.

Each year TEMS heads to the stores to buy as many toys as they possibly can. This year, they went above and beyond years past. The DHR parking lot looked like a North Pole workshop by the time all the boxes were unloaded. EMS Director Mitchell Snipes said the success of this years project was a result of hard work from everyone involved.

“We started last year taking up toys for Project Merry Christmas,” Snipes said. “The second half of the season we also got out and worked and earned money.”

He said money and toys were collected by several different methods.

“We had several projects going on that we actually were able to get toys up for. We had car washes, cake raffles and other different raffles,” Snipes said. “We had breakfast with Santa last week where the kids could eat breakfast with Santa and the proceeds from it went back to this project. We also did some blood pressure screenings and were able to collect toys doing that.”

TEMS has a reputation of always being there for the community, Snipes said. He said this was just another way for them to serve the community in addition to their other duties.

“This is just sort of a way for us to give back to the community,” Snipes said. “We had a food drive that ended in November so we got a late start on this, later than we wanted to, but we had a really good time working it and feel like it is improving every year.”

Last year’s drive looked as if it would be tough to beat. However, many observers said they believed this year’s collection doubled last years. Snipes said the goal was to improve from the previous year each time and he also felt this goal had been met.

“We are just going to try to build off this,” Snipes said. “I don’t know how many pieces we have this year. Last year we counted them up and we probably have twice as many as we had last year. It has definitely grown a lot this year.”