Not Just Loose Change

It's that time of year again when Salvation Army volunteers set up kettles outside malls and on street corners around the country to collect donations. The  kettle campaign, with its holiday bell-ringers, is the group's largest single fundraiser. And already this year, some kettles are getting more than the usual dollar bills and small coins.

An anonymous donor dropped a gold coin worth more than $1,000 in the collection kettle in south-central Pennsylvania. York Salvation Army Maj. Lurlene Mudge told the Associated Press the South African gold Krugerrand was dropped in a kettle outside a Kmart store in Springettsbury Township, just outside York about a week ago.

It was wrapped in a $1 bill and wasn't discovered until the collections were being counted. Mudge told the AP it's been two years since the York Salvation Army got a gold coin in their collection.

The very next day, someone dropped a coin worth even more into a collection kettle for the Grand Island Salvation Army in Nebraska. The one-ounce gold $20 liberty coin from 1878 and valued at $1,300 was dropped into the kettle by an anonymous donor at Grand Island's north Wal-Mart,

The group has received a valuable coin in each of at least the last three years of the annual holiday season kettle drive, Capt. Dave Mowers told the Grand Island Independent. Last year a donated coin sold for about $700.

"It's always a surprise," Mowers told the paper. "It's always a fun thing to find something like that."

Now that's the kind of change we could all use around this time of year.

Photo courtesy of pheezy via Flickr.