12/21/2006

Store plays Santa for teenage boy

By Kathy Gibbons
Features editor

Sometimes you hear about something so nice that it just makes you smile.

That's what I thought after talking with a single mom who lives here in town. She works at the mall, and her 13-year-old son spends a lot of time there, too. He comes after school and waits for her to get off work so they can go home together.

It's been a tough year. She and her husband separated in the spring, and even though it had been clear for years that they didn't get along, her son didn't react well to his dad moving out.

His mom says he started experimenting with drugs and alcohol and was flunking out of school. Finally, she got him to talk about what he was doing and feeling. After consulting her priest, she ended up enrolling him in Catholic school for the fall. Since then, he's made a huge turn-around, boosting his grades back up and not getting into trouble.

As part of that, his mom had promised to give him $20 for each report card A, and $10 for each B. Meanwhile, he'd seen a "hoodie” at one of the stores in the mall and fell in love with it. He stopped in to look at it a lot, and became friends with the staff at the store. They knew how much he wanted the hoodie, because he was always in there admiring it.

Buying it wasn't in the family budget. So he was waiting for report card time, when his mom would reward his grades with cash. And his grades were good — two As and two Bs. Quite a change from the Ds and Es of before.

As soon as he got the money, he went to the store.

"When he came in with the money from his report card, ready to buy, they said, "Oh, someone bought it, it's not here anymore, but we've got a shipment coming in,'” says his mom. "But they were playing an act of saying 'It's not here,' because that wasn't the case. The case was that THEY bought it and ... they had it in a gift bag, and they said, 'Here you go, Merry Christmas.'

"They took it upon themselves to purchase the hoodie, and they got him some gloves and some extra things with it — they all pitched in. He said he jumped up and down and he had tears in his eyes and he was hugging everybody in that store that worked there.”

The mom couldn't get over the kindness of the staff, many of them young and probably not rolling in dough themselves.

"He's made really good friends with these people at the store,” she said. "They know I'm going through a divorce and that money is tight. It was just the act of kindness, knowing what our situation is.”

And the magic worked by Santa's elves at the mall store couldn't have come at a better time. Christmas is going to be leaner than it has been in the past. She used this week's paycheck to buy gifts for her son and his sister.

"I wasn't able to do what I used to do every year,” she said. "But I just don't want my kids to be sad at Christmas.

"I'm just trying to make it as normal as possible.”