Santa’s got nothing on Creative Loafing readers. Thanks to the winning bidders in our first Online Holiday Auction, CL was able to give thousands of dollars to The Children’s Home — $12,077.32, to be exact.

That’s a pretty good haul for our first time out, and we were happy to pay a visit to the Home last week, where Merrill Stewart, the Home’s director of community giving & communications, and Cathy Stone, the chief development officer, just happened to have a jumbo blank check ready to be filled out. The real check is, as they say, in the mail. (Photo, L to R: CL Online Producer Stephen Hammill, myself, Stone and Stewart.)

Even if the check was symbolic, the good the auction did for The Children’s Home was very real. According to Stewart, the state’s child welfare system pays only for clothing, food and shelter. Everything else — “all the therapeutic services to help children heal from the trauma of abuse,” says Stewart, plus the recreation center, the wood shop, “all the fun stuff that just helps them to be a kid,” in Stone’s words — is paid for by contribution. The cost of those vital services? $120 a day per child, or $43,800 a year. (The Home serves about 120 students over the course of each year, with 50 in residence at any one time.)

So do the math, winning bidders. You can think of that $12,000-plus as paying for a quarter of the cost of helping a single child for a year, or as paying for a weekend’s worth of services to 50 kids. Either way, you’ve done some good.

And you’ve also done well: Your significant others are getting some very nice gifts.

This article appears in Dec 16-22, 2009.