MUNCIE, Ind. (NewsLink)— The Christmas season has people starting to think about presents for the ones they love, but one man’s wife had a different idea on how to spread the Christmas spirit.
“She said that instead of us buying each other something for Christmas this year, let’s go out and look for a family and see if we can take them on and buy them something for Christmas instead of you and I doing something for Christmas,” President of Secret Families Alan Holdren said.
And since they started this in 2004, the numbers of families grew. They started with one family that they knew from their hometown, but now reach over hundreds of families in Delaware County.
“We serve now yearly somewhere between 350 and 400 families,” Holdren said.
People can get involved with helping Secret Families by donating, or becoming one of the teams on their shopping day. On the first Saturday of every December, the shopping team goes to Meijer and spends $550 on each family, then moves across the street to the Toyota dealership where the gifts are wrapped and delivered to the houses.
“We raise quite a bit of money around $100,080 to make this happen every year and it happens in less than six weeks,” Vice President of Secret Families Chris Crabtree said.
But Holdren and Crabtree both believe that this work and the organization is God-driven.
“Wherever that leads us we’ll go,” Holdren said.
They also say that the work needs to be sustainable no matter what they do.
“You just don’t want it to end,” Crabtree said.
One person helping another person is what Secret Families embodies their idea of one story at a time. Where everyone has a different story, and it affects everyone and what they do.
For more information on Secret Families or how to get involved you can visit their website at secretfamilies.org.
For comments or concerns regarding this story, contact alchalker@bsu.edu.
