LEWISTON – Bates College and St. Mary’s Regional Medical Center have many long-standing partnerships in support of volunteer services to the community. A small group of volunteers from the hospital and college hand-crafted 120 oversized Christmas stockings this year.

The bright red stockings are presented to the parents of newborns delivered in the Family Birthing Unit at St. Mary’s during the holidays.

A tradition of more than 30 years, babies born in St. Mary’s between Thanksgiving and the first week of the New Year typically make their first trip home tucked safely inside the oversized stockings.

Many families use the stockings for Santa to fill through childhood years and beyond.

St. Mary’s volunteer Gisele Gagnon of Auburn has been a dedicated stocking designer for more than 10 years. She was assisted by hospital volunteers Beverly Bressler of Minot, Denise Dubois of Lewiston and Dot Lajoie of Turner.

Kathleen Kuritz, St. Mary’s volunteer services coordinator, recruited additional designers to the project this year. Kuritz, whose husband Paul is a Bates College professor of theater, reached out to Kathleen Peters, supervisor of the theater costume shop at Bates.

Peters expanded the circle to include a number of costume design students who assisted her in creating more of the stockings for St. Mary’s newborns.

The hospital now has enough baby stockings to last two seasons of Christmas.

Bates theater student costume design volunteers were Elizabeth Lakin, Erin Faulder, Madeline Weber, Lily Freidling, Margaret Koerber, Nicole Kahn, Sarah Dice-Goldberg, Kaitlin Wellens and Elizabeth Lee.

Gagnon and Peters recently paid a visit to the Lewiston home of Jacob and Monique Paris to meet their first born child, Caleb Joseph. Caleb was delivered at St. Mary’s on Dec.r 4.

Jacob Paris is employed in the children’s services department of the Lewiston Public Library in the same position Monique Paris held before him. Jacob is a freelance artist, a multi-instrumentalist musician and Web designer. The couple are members of Redeemer Presbyterian Church and look forward to the possibility of a Christmas Eve baptism for their new baby.