Angel Trees full this year

RALEIGH -- Whatever gifts they find under the Christmas tree this year, Valeisha Harrison's children will know the truth about where they came from.

Their mom couldn't afford to buy them.

Harrison, a full-time student in anesthesiology at Wake Technical Community College, was laid off from her job at a hospital preschool facility last year. When Christmas came around, there was no money for new clothes or toys, so Harrison did something she had never done before. She asked for help.

Her five kids were among 4,500 Wake County children whose names were hung as ornaments on the Salvation Army's Angel Tree in 2008.

This year, there will have to be two trees, and when they're set up today their branches will be heavier than ever with the names of 5,400 children whose parents feared that Christmas would otherwise pass them by.

"That's enough children to fill six elementary schools," said Paige Bagwell, spokesman for the Salvation Army of Wake County. "It just breaks my heart."

The Salvation Army Angel Tree began in Lynchburg, Va., in 1979. Sponsors take cards off the trees with just enough information to go shopping: boy or girl, age, clothing and shoe size. Some programs add items from the recipient's wish list.

Even if a child doesn't get an Angel Tree sponsor, each one on the Salvation Army's list gets one or two new toys, bought with money dropped into the organization's signature red kettles, which also roll out today.

Already, volunteers are sorting baby dolls, remote-control cars, nail-polish kits, skateboards, stacks of footballs and basketballs. The goodies are arranged on tables made of plywood sheets and sawhorses in the old shop area of a former car dealership on Wake Forest Road. Just before Christmas, parents who applied in October and met income qualifications will come in and "shop" for their children.

Jason Lake, who works in the social services section of the Salvation Army, is overseeing the preparations and accepting contributions as they come in.

"They tell me that it picks up after Thanksgiving. The stuff really starts coming in," he said. "And with the economy this year, we're going to need every bit of it."

Families are adopted

Many people "adopt" families at Christmastime, through variations on the angel tree at their churches, schools or workplaces. Starting Dec. 1, for example, visitors to Litchford Falls Healthcare & Rehabilitation Center in North Raleigh will be able to take names off a tree decorated to ensure that every resident receives a holiday present.

Kathy Gregory is getting help this Christmas from a corporate sponsor that has offered to help families like hers at Walnut Terrace, a subsidized housing development in Raleigh. Usually, Gregory said, her ex-husband gives her a couple of hundred dollars to buy gifts for the 6-year-old twins, Journee and Destynee, and 14-year-old Dominique. But he's had to replace the transmission on his van twice this year and is still trying to pay back the money he borrowed to do the work, so the video games and boots the little ones were hoping for probably are not coming. If they get no toys at all, Gregory said, the girls would be OK.

"It would hurt me more than it would hurt them," she said. On Christmas morning, she gets up before the children and waits in the little living room so she can see their faces when they come in.

"I'm just a big kid at heart."

Petra Hales, manager of Walnut Terrace, said that between the anonymous corporate sponsor and Hales' church, Watts Chapel Baptist, dozens of families in the neighborhood will get a Christmas boost. But there are 500 children in Walnut Terrace, she said, many more than she has donors to help.

Harrison, the mother of five, got her children on the Salvation Army's list again this year because it made such a big difference last Christmas. The holiday is not about the gifts, she said, but having presents to open brought a feeling of normalcy.

"It was kind of a reassurance of, 'Everything is going to be OK,'" Harrison said.

This Christmas, if her children ask where the bounty came from, Harrison will say the same as last year.

"I told them it was from an angel."