Bar on service providing/volunteering

My family was interested in volunteering for Christmas this year instead of the entire x-mas thing however, apparently any volunteering you can do on xmas is booked from like June/July onwards. People love volunteering at xmas and apparently volunteers are not that needed. Its like when there was an oil spill in Santa Barbara. People kept showing up at the beach and there was an entire team in charge of informing them that they could not volunteer, that they would be doing more harm than good. I have heard a similar thing when people are giving blood, generally the demand is « supply It makes me wonder because there are still all these problems, yet helping doesn’t seem to help anymore, at least your helping needs to be way more out of the box than it used to. You can no longer just be “of service”, you have to actively and creatively problem solve in order to figure out where your help would be valuable. Unfortunately people aren’t as good at being creative as they are at just showing up.