Angels for Christmas

Angels for Christmas helps families that might be going through financial problems, or hardships.

Families that qualify can either be from the department of work force services, a church or clergy group that has submitted hardship claims, the local food pantry, schools, the Family Support Center, The Senior Center and Women’s Crisis Center, and the Boys and Girls Club.

The process: We’ll use for an example Family A  who’s family income has significantly dropped because Dad’s hours were cut.

Family A has 3 kids we’ll use

Sarah 15

Tyler 10

Ricky 5

The parents from a family will fill out a list of items that they need and want.

Sarah 15 wants make-up, shoes, an mp3 player, and hair products (but also needs a coat and pants).

Each of these items will have its own individual Angel (paper Angel) that will be hanging from Christmas trees in different stores, business, and across the entire state.

So in Box Elder County we had over 200 families this year and we’ll just use 3 kids for each family.  Each kid will get 5 gifts each. So that’s over 3,000 Angels that residents in the Box Elder County were buying for.   Each year there are left over Angels on the tree’s by the deadline date.  Triumph Youth Services and a few other businesses takes care of buying the rest of the items.  This is such a great experience for our students to go out and shop for these families.  It really teaches them humility and the true spirit of giving and Christmas.

We don’t wrap the presents as we want the parents to have that experience.  It’s an amazing site to see how happy and thankful these parents are when they show up to pick up their gifts.

Planning starts in the spring time as we rely heavily on corporate sponsors and donations.  We’ve had our students helping with different parts of the project; from writing donation letters, phone calls, marketing, setting up locations for Angel Tree’s and drop boxes and shopping for the gifts.

A truly great experience for everyone involved.