Tinsel by Hank Stuever

Author:Hank Stuever
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HMH Books

11

The Neediest

JILL CUMNOCK AGREES to let me observe behind the scenes—and help out, if needed—as Frisco Family Services Center’s staff members and volunteers collect, inventory, and distribute the hundreds of gifts collected through the Angel Tree operation. Kimberly Girard, a twenty-eight-year-old social worker, is in her third year of running the program. Because the center has outgrown space at the food bank, the management at Frisco Square offered a vacant retail space that had briefly been a dry-cleaning shop.

Kimberly is standing behind the sales counter in the space on a sunny, seventy-degree Tuesday afternoon, December 12, wearing a red Santa hat and a tight T-shirt. She has an Excel spreadsheet open on her Dell laptop. She and another employee, Myrna Martinez, got extra-large sodas from the Subway next door and have the urban-hits radio station on, which is playing R&B holiday tunes from what already seems like many Christmases ago, by Destiny’s Child, ’N Sync, and Boyz II Men. Behind a makeshift partition of hospital-blue sheets, they’ve set up tables and a work area where volunteers will retrieve and assemble gift packages for each client. The bare walls are covered with cardboard snowflakes and penguins.

Kimberly walks me through the operation. There are four rows of temporary metal shelves, making narrow, twenty-five-foot-long aisles all the way to the back of the store. The shelves, which are seven feet tall, are already filling up with toys that have been labeled and arranged by code number. Clients with the lowest code numbers will begin picking up their gifts next Monday. The pickup appointments will continue on the quarter-hour, all day, in order, until the last client is scheduled to arrive late in the day on December 21. In theory, the shelves will empty out from right to left, then left to right, up one aisle and down another, until the last toy has been given away.

The gifts are double-checked in Kimberly’s database before they’re shelved. “People keep bringing presents that are wrapped, even though we tell them not to,” she says. “We can’t do that to parents. You don’t want your child to be unwrapping something on Christmas morning and not even know what it’s going to be. So the first thing we do is unwrap them.” A fleet of new bicycles is parked along one wall. One child has asked for a giant red beanbag, which is next to the bikes. Along another wall are dozens of tubes of wrapping paper, which will be included in each family’s bundle.

In the back storeroom, Kimberly sighs. “This is where all the extra stuff is going.” It’s piles and piles of new clothes and random toys, where the plaintive, electronic “bye-bye” of a buried Elmo can be heard from the bottom of the heap. Two volunteers are dividing the items by gender, which means half the room is turning girly pink and purple. The empty, rotating dry-cleaner racks are coming in handy here, for hanging up baby, toddler, and children’s clothes by size and gender.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.