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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.

One notable trend (and I won’t reveal names here so as not to spoil any surprises): The folks who bought the “critic” items didn’t do so to get their own shot at curmudgeondom. They’re giving these opportunities to opinionated friends and family. The woman who bought dinner with Food Editor Brian Ries, for instance, told us it’s “a Christmas gift to my husband who thinks he is a food critic as do most of his friends.” The Tampa man who bought “Be a Movie Critic!” is paying tribute to a lifetime of film-going with his best friend: “We’re both big movie buffs who spent high school seeing every movie that came out, no matter how awful.”

The big-ticket items reflected the eclectic tastes of our readership. Bidding went high for beer ($1,250 for “Taste the best of Cigar City Brewing”), broadcasting ($1,025.69 for “Co-host for a day with Cowhead”) and Henri Matisse ($500 for a private tour of the new Tampa Museum of Art and its inaugural Matisse show). The biggest ticket of all, of course, was “Buy the cover.” After a last-minute battle (aspirants included a church and a politician), the top bid came in at $1,700. As readers will find out in the issue of January 20, the winner’s cover idea may offer readers another chance to help The Children’s Home.

I’m pleased to announce he wasn’t the only bidder inspired to pay it forward. So were Brian Bailey and Dexter Fabian of the St. Pete marketing/PR/graphic design firm Rearden Killion Communications, winner of “Item #03: Buy the news.” Full disclosure: Bailey and Fabian are neighbors of mine. But I had no idea they were bidding until the winners were announced, and I was surprised further by their plans.

Rearden Killion runs “I Love the Burg,” the Downtown St. Pete Facebook page they describe as “the premiere online source for news and happenings in Downtown St. Petersburg.” Their original goal was to use the “news” story as a means of touting “I Love the Burg,” but now they’ve decided to take it another step. They’re going to enlist their fans to suggest “people, families, causes, projects, charities” that may need help, and use the CL story on Jan. 20 as a way of publicizing the most compelling cases. The duo were inspired to take this route when, on the day they won the auction, one of their fans coincidentally contacted them to say that she had just been laid off. That’s when the idea dawned: Maybe they could publicize their Facebook page (and their firm) and help people find jobs, get shelter, support a cause at the same time.

Doing well by doing good. Sounds like what we were trying to do with CL’s Online Holiday Auction. Our thanks to everyone who made it happen.

PS: If you've got some ideas for people or causes who deserve to  part of the Rearden Killion news story, leave a comment below. And let us know (after Christmas, if you prefer)  if you have stories about items you won in the auction and gave to family and friends.