Community Corner
Help Make Christmas Stockings for 2000 Kids In Need
Urban Missionaries, Tom & Sharon Thomas of Lansing are asking the community to help make Christmas stockings for area kids in need.
Sitting on the porch of the home of Sharon Thomas, were the first signs of Christmas.
Inside three boxes were red and green stockings carefully wrapped with love from a group of ladies in Kansas.
For 25 years, urban missionaries, Tim and Sharon Thomas from Lansing have given away 1500 filled stockings to kids who might not otherwise have Christmas.
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“There has been a slow decrease in what I get now,“ said Sharon Thomas. “There are many more organizations that have caught on to this and other ways of giving at Christmas, but I am still thankful for what I get.”
With the need growing, the Thomas’s are asking communities to help make stockings. Red for girls, Green for the boys. The finished stocking should be about 10-by-14 inches.
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Filling the stockings with new items is a plus. Girls like items such as hair supplies and jewelry and stickers. Boys enjoy getting Matchbox cars, action figures, and candy.
“When we go to some of the shelters, the favorite thing the kids like to find in their stockings is a toothbrush and toothpaste,” adds Thomas. “It’s the simple things. “
The couple have gotten more requests this year, they are hoping to give away 2000 this year. Anyone from scout troops to ladies church groups to even sending 1 filled stocking can change a child’s life.
“The need increases each year,“ said Thomas. “Mainly because we have done this for so many years, others are asking us to help their communities. The need is endless. We go to women’s shelters, Ford Height’s Medgar Evans School, we give to churches in Chicago who are ministering in depressed neighborhoods.”
“Sometimes this is the only give the child will get for Christmas.”
Some of the stockings Sharon gets, 14 of them to be exact, come from Alaska. Then there is a group of women in their 80’s from Hinsdale who make 150 stockings each year.
“To me the joy in the faces of the kids is priceless and worth it all, “ adds Thomas.
To help the Thomas family meet their goal, e-mail Sharon at tsthomas2@comcast.net or call at 708-418-4301.
