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Highland - December 29

Paula Campbell - Community Correspondent
Posted 12/28/20

Recently I wrote about the memorial Luminaries Project that the Shohola Lions Club does every year where luminaries can be purchased for $5.00 and then on Christmas Eve, they are placed along the …

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Highland - December 29

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Recently I wrote about the memorial Luminaries Project that the Shohola Lions Club does every year where luminaries can be purchased for $5.00 and then on Christmas Eve, they are placed along the railings of the Shohola Bridge from Barryville, New York to Shohola Pennsylvania.

It is a perfect spot for this project since the word Shohola means a “Place of Peace” in the Leni-Lenape native American language and the location where the Bridge was eventually built was a traditional river crossing site over the Delaware River for the Leni-Lenape and several other native American communities.

Since we had what can best be described as a biblical rainstorm over Christmas Eve that dumped over three inches of rain and washed away about a foot of snow in a twenty-four-hour timeframe, the Shohola Lion's Club's Luminary Project has been moved this year to New Year's Eve, Thursday, December 31st.

You can still purchase a luminary candle and come to the bridge at 4:00p.m. on New Year's Eve and light your luminary yourself or the Lions Club members will do it for you. It is a wonderful way to remember a family member or friends and support the vision care and scholarship programs of the Lions Club.

You still can purchase a luminary at Wayne Bank, Milford Auto Body Shop, Harry's Gas Station and Rohman's Inn in Shohola and Back to Baker's and Il Castello Restaurant in Barryville, and St. Ann's Church in Shohola after mass.

If you have never seen the luminaries, please take your family and walk across the Bridge on Christmas Eve. It is lovely to see.

Heartfelt congratulations are in order for Lou Monteleone who was just named a “Hometown Hero” by the Greater Barryville Chamber of Commerce.

Lou was recognized not only as a successful businessman with three businesses (The Corner Ice Cream Shop, The Eldred Liquor Store and the Pizza Piazza) but also as a prodigious fundraiser for those causes that help anyone in need.

Even through the Covid-19 pandemic that grounded the Monteleone family's extremely popular Santa Express from touring through towns and villages in Sullivan and Orange Counties, the Santa's Village of Giving set up in the Pizza Piazza raised over a thousand donated items this winter for pet shelters, food, children's toys and new clothing for adults and children for the Coalition for the Homeless.

According to Lou a lot of the donations went to our Town of Highland residents in need this year. Then after fifteen years of sponsoring St. Baldrick's Day to raise awareness and funds to aid research for pediatric cancers, Lou has spearheaded and championed and shared his support with any local patient fighting a cancer diagnosis and to date has raised more than $175,000 for the St. Baldricks Foundation for Pediatric Cancer Research.

In addition, every year Lou pretty much sets the Christmas spirit meter on the highest setting and decorates the Town of Eldred from top to bottom with his spectacular Christmas decorations earning him the treasured moniker of “Mr. Christmas”. Congratulations to Lou Monteleone for being selected as our Hometown Hero!

I will not be sorry to see the taillights of the year 2020 in my rear-view mirror that is for sure! This has been an awful year. With 80.5 million people infected with Covid-19 and 1.7 million losing their lives world-wide to the virus, it has been such a miserable year for all of us.

But with the vaccine now being distributed, there seems to finally be a ray of hope on the horizon for the defeat of the Covid-19 virus once and for all. With everything that has happened to our country, our American resilience and spirit still shines through and hopefully there will be better times ahead for all of us.

Happy 2021 New Year wishes to everyone!

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