Sub For Santa

Our family had the opportunity to help out a family in need this year. We sent out this letter to all of our family and a few of our closest friends.

Dearest Family and Friends

As most of you know, I had to go back to work this year.  Luckily, I absolutely love my job.  I am an ESL assistant at Provo High School.  With this job I’ve met many wonderful kids that I love very much and wish I could help every single one of them.  But, there is one student in particular, named Raul, whose family situation has truly touched my heart.  Just to share one of the many stories I’ve heard: Raul has 3 pairs of pants, but he will only wear two of them to school because he is saving the third pair for his younger brother to have, so he will have one pair of new pants to start high school.  He is such a sweet kid, so humble and kind, and I would really like to do something special for their family for Christmas.

My sweet love and I are in no position to help this family as much as they need it.  For the past couple of weeks I’ve been thinking and praying about this family a lot, wondering what I can do to help them.  The thing that kept coming to my mind was that if I could have several people that could help us, then together we could really make a substantial contribution towards their needs, which are great.

So this is my thought.  If we could all donate 5, 10 or 20 dollars, or whatever amount regardless of its size, I know that together we can make their Christmas.  Raul needed 10 dollars for a class assignment and had asked his mom for it and she said they didn’t have it.  So, I’m pretty sure there won’t be many gifts under the tree.  I don’t know specific needs, so I was thinking that if we all could donate I would get gift cards at Target, Wal Mart, etc., then they could find things they really need the most from the money we gather.

If this is something you would like to do, you can donate to Jared’s PayPal account.  Just go to www.paypal.com and click on “Send Money” and put in an amount and choose, “Friends and Family”.  Click Continue.  For the TO: put in shop@prolook.com for the email address and put your address in the From: field and click Continue.  Fill out the information on the last page and submit it.  I was hoping to drop off the gift cards by next Thursday, so they had enough time to get gifts.

If you can’t donate at this time, we completely understand.  Please just include them in your thoughts and prayers.  Thank you for being the type of family and friends that we feel comfortable enough to turn to for this need.  We continuously talk about how blessed we are to know, love and be loved by each and every one of you. 

Best wishes on this holiday season

Lissette and Jared

The response was wonderful.

Troy made one suggestion about just handing the family money. He said that in his past experience with helping out families in need that he noticed that  if you just hand parents money they will usually use the money for bills or food and the kids really don’t get gifts. So we decided to do a little of both. We took what we knew from each boy and bought them presents and handed the mom $100 in cash and a $50 gift card to Wal-Mart. This is what we bought

For  Raul

2 Pairs of pants,3 shirts, pencils, a pencil sharpener (he loves to draw), a journal (for a story he has in his head but hasn’t written down) and a jacket

For Miguel

a scooter, 2 pairs of pants, 2 shirts, and a jacket

For the Family

We bought them games like Sorry, Uno, Skip-Bo, Dominoes, and Bop-It

 

Jo Ann & Gary donated a Ham Christmas Dinner with rolls, oranges, and dessert. Our ward had a food donation going during our Ward Christmas Party and the bishop let us use all the food that was collect.

These are all the wonderful families that donated to make this all possible:

 

It was so exciting for all of us. We even took Sebastian along for the delivery.

As we suspected they had nothing in their home to bring to mind that it was even Christmas time. There were no decorations, no gifts, not even a Christmas tree.

This is the letter we wrote to everyone after our very very Spiritual experience.

We just wanted to thank each of you for your wonderful generosity and let you know how it went.  We just returned from the Sanchez family’s house where we dropped off the food and gifts that you helped us provide.  When we showed up the mother and sons were sitting together, Raul was sketching on the couch.  They answered the door and we all said, “Merry Christmas” and the mom began to cry when she saw us and what we had in our hands.  We started to bring in the food and gifts and Paris noticed that the younger boy had gone to his room because he was also crying.  He soon returned to give hugs and thanks.  They didn’t have anything in the apartment for Christmas:  No tree, no presents, nothing. 

Through tears and thanks she said that nobody in here whole life has ever done something so wonderful like this for her family.   She said that life sometimes gets very hard and at times depressing and everything goes wrong and just when you think there is no hope, God sends Angels to help.  As she said this the spirit was so strong that Lissette started to cry with her.  On the way home we all talked about how strong the spirit was and the feeling we all had while we were in their home.  Tristan started to cry so hard and kept saying how great she felt and that her tears were happy tears and she’d never had that feeling of happy tears so strong before.  We all felt blessed to have this example of the spirit witnessing to us that we were fulfilling one of the greatest commandments, to love our fellow man.   Blessed that we could do for them what He would do if He were here.

You are all the angels that have helped this family and we love you all and thank you from the bottom of our hearts for what you have done to help them.  We hope as you read this that you feel the spirit of what you each brought to this family’s life.  Thank you so much for your generosity and we wish you all a wonderful Christmas and are so grateful for your Christlike love for others.

All our Love,

Lissette, Jared, Kids and Sebastian

It was such a wonderful experience we want to do it again every year!!!!