While some children impatiently wait to unbox their Christmas gifts, there are a lot of others who do not receive any gifts for Christmas.
Sadly, there are more struggling families in the world than we are proud to accept.
There are people who hardly put bread on the table and Christmas gifts are a luxury they cannot afford. But kindness and humanity are not totally dead yet.
Thankfully, there are people out there who try their best to spread kindness and love; people who arrange gifts for children who can’t afford them.
Jim Annis, an 80-year-old army veteran, is one of such people.
The only thing Annis does in the whole holiday season is to give back to the people who are in need. It’s been 50 years that Annis has been making toys for poor kids.
He said: “When the Salvation Army gives out food and clothes to people in this area, I give out my toys.”
Annis makes around 300 handcrafted wooden toys every Christmas and gives them to the Salvation Army of Stanford so that they can distribute them to the needy children.
The material he uses to make all those gifts mainly consists of the wooden scrap he gets from his neighborhood.
Making all these gifts costs Annis upwards of $1,000 every Christmas.
The vet says it is not about the money but about the smile on the faces of the children. Annis, who has firsthand experience of not getting gifts for Christmas, hopes no one may feel the same as he did.
“My dad he worked, but didn’t make a lot of money. It’s hard to have a big Christmas with five kids,” Annis recalled.
The toys he crafts from wood include dolls, fire trucks, and piggy banks. He wants to keep doing his little act of kindness for the rest of his life.
“I love when people ask me how much do I get paid for making these toys. I tell them my pay is when I see the smile on kids’ faces,” said Annis.
“I hope to be able to do this until my toes curl up.”
Replaced!