The lunch room at Cougar Valley Elementary school was filled with rambunctious first- and second-graders as they watched their letters to Santa go into a full-size bright-red mailbox on Friday.
Children at the school wrote 8,786 letters (some kids wrote more than one letter) as part of a Macy’s “Believe” fundraiser for Make-A-Wish. Macy’s donated $1 or $2 per letter to Make-A-Wish. The kid’s letters meant Macy’s donated a total of $15,772 which will fund wishes for children with life-threatening medical conditions in cities across the country.
Macy’s will donate up to $1 million this year with the program.
One unsigned letter hand-written in pencil read, “Dear Santa, i hope chirstmas (sic) will be a great one because chirstmas is my favorite Holiday. I love that writing letters can help kids who don’t have a good chirstmas each year. I hope my letters make it to the north pole.”
Another read, “Dear Santa, i want all the children in the Hospital to have a good christmas because there people to so they deserve to have a christmas Just as much as us. Sincerly, Kyndall.”
Cougar Valley staff member Kim Lake-Loveless was in charge of the program. She said some of the kid’s letters are along the lines of “I want, I want, I want,” but not all of them.
“I think it’s important that the kids learn how to give back the community,” Lake-Loveless said.
“These kids, for the most part, are very blessed. They’re healthy, they’ve got great families. Everything is stable. And there are kids out there that don’t have that. There are kids that are suffering, that are sick.”
Staff from the Silverdale Macy’s were on hand to direct the event, including store manager Ryan Ramoso, visual manager David Jones and sales associate Laura Shaw. Shaw is also a Make-A-Wish wish-granting volunteer.
Shaw said the $15,772 donated would be enough to fund about three wishes, as a typical wish costs around $5,000. Those wishes could be for an item, for for a community project, to meet a celebrity, or something else. The exact wish was up to the wishee’s imagination, she said.
Ramoso said that over the past seven years $8.6 million has been donated to Make-A-Wish.
To learn more visit www.macys.com/believe and www.wish.org.
