Time for Our Secret Santa Project! We Need YOUR Help!

UPDATE:  The list of families and their NEEDS/WANTS is up!  You can head here to see that list. If you are committing to donating one of the items on the Sign Up Genius list, just add in your name/email and cross off that item on our list so another family doesn’t double purchase.  When you mail or drop your items off, PLEASE write which family number the item is for!  

Head here to see the full list of the families who are in desperate need for our help this year.  (You can pick something specific to donate from this list–or donate something that is needed on the list below for our Refugee families.

Wow…. that’s seriously all I can say… There were over 150 families that were nominated for our Freebies2Deals Secret Santa Project this year! And they were ALL very, very deserving of help. Because I am never sure of how many donations we will receive from F2D readers, I had to limit the number of families chosen to only 30.  My heart is breaking that we aren’t able to help more at this point.  But please know that I did read every single entry– it literally took me hours–and I took every single entry into consideration.

We have a few families who have not responded to our emails.  If you nominated a family and haven’t heard anything, please check your spam or junk folders to double check that you didn’t receive an email from us.

If the family you nominated wasn’t chosen and still needs help, I would search for other organizations online that give help to those in need this Holiday Season and try to submit your family to one of their programs instead.  

For those of you who want to help donate to the Freebies2Deals Secret Santa Project this year, we REALLY need your help!  Doing these projects each year makes me so nervous.  I always worry that we won’t get enough donations or we won’t be able to fulfill all of the family’s needs.  So ANYTHING you can do to help- even if it’s only a few bucks or a small toy makes a huge difference.  It’s not what you can do alone–it’s what all of us can do together when we combine our efforts.  There are thousands of you who read the blog. So by stepping up and donating whatever you can–even those small toys or a few dollars helps!  Seriously.

WHO ARE WE HELPING THIS YEAR?

This year, we have some families who are literally falling apart.  One of our family’s fathers is fighting brain cancer and only has a few more months to live, a few different families have family members fighting cancer, one family has 10 kids who just lost their mother to a car accident, one family’s father (and sole provider) has been in a coma for months and unable to work & some families don’t even have furniture in their homes and are barely making it by with food.  

This is why I keep doing the Secret Santa Project with you guys each year.

We are in the process of putting all of the family’s information, NEEDS & WANTS in the Sign up Genius List to make it super easy for all of you who want to donate. That way, we won’t get duplicate donations for each family and you can pick and choose whatever items YOU want to donate to help these families out.

**As soon as the Sign Up Genius List is ready, I will post and let you all know.  You can then head over and sign up to donate certain items. So stay tuned!

Along with that, I want you to all feel like you can donate–even if the items on the Sign Up Genius list that you wanted to donate get taken or if you have other items you have already purchased that aren’t on our designated list.

SECOND: One thing I know for certain is that there are ALWAYS people in need!  Because of this, feel free to donate ANY new toy item that would benefit a family in need!

IF we receive anything that won’t work specifically for these 30 Families we have chosen, we will donate to the Refugees here in Utah.  If you aren’t aware, thousands and thousands of families have had to flee their native lands due to war, persecution and safety for their lives. And because they literally pick up in the middle of the night and flee, they don’t arrive in the U.S. without anything but the clothing on their backs.  They literally leave everything they own behind. These refugees are legally brought here by the U.S. State Department and will work to try to become legal citizens and permanent residents. 

As we are going into the winter months, these families need as much as we can give to help.  Can you imagine being in a new strange country, not being able to speak the language or understand and having children to try to feed, cloth and keep warm???  And a lot of these families have NEVER seen snow!  They don’t know how cold it gets here– as a lot of families come from countries who have never had snowfall. 

Their circumstances break my heart and because they have nothing, they are very easy to collect donations for.

Here are the items they are in need of.  Please only donate **NEW** items, due to the nature of our Secret Santa Project: