Thank you to everyone who purchased gifts from stores within the Golden Centre and had these wrapped by our team at the Christmas gift-wrapping hub. It was a fantastic chance for us to chat with our wonderful shoppers and learn about how so many people were planning to spend the festive period.

It was also an outstanding opportunity to help our community. You may recall that when a Golden Centre shopper visited the gift-wrapping hub, they were presented with a small gold disc to place in one of six charity boxes of their choice. Each disc signified a donation of $1 made by the Golden Centre to the shopper’s charity of choice.

Such was the success of this initiative the following charities received a share of a whopping $2,713 from discs counted and a further total of $1,005 in additional cash donations!

The Cancer Society of Otago & Southland | The Little Miracles Trust | Dog Rescue Dunedin |Dunedin Cat Rescue | The Nest Collective | Ōtepoti-Dunedin Whānau Refuge.

Another interesting fact about the Golden Centre Christmas Gift Wrapping Service was the amount of wrapping paper that was used to package all of those perfect presents. This exceeded our wildest guesses when we calculated that 2,623m of paper had adorned shoppers’ gifts.

To put this into perspective, if we suspended 2,623m of wrapping paper from a great height it would be:

• Over three times higher than the tallest building in the World, the Burj Khalifa in the United Arab Emirates.

• Eight times higher than Auckland’s Sky Tower.

• Nearly four times higher than Mount Cargill and nearly seven times higher than Signal Hill.

• Nearly three times deeper than New Zealand’s deepest cave, Nettlebed Cave in Southland and over six times deeper than our country’s deepest lake, Lake Hauroko in the in Fiordland National Park.

Looking closer to home, if we laid all of the wrapping paper used in line along George Street, it would span the distance from the Golden Centre to Woodhaugh Gardens in North Dunedin!

In summary and taking into account the amount of money raised for local charities and the number of gifts that didn’t have to be wrapped late at night by tired parents, or while hiding from loved ones, we hope you share our feeling that Christmas Gift Wrapping at the Golden Centre is a truly wondrous thing!