It was the night before Christmas
Christmas 1998.
Josh Bailey, 10, stared in awe at the stairwell leading up to his bedroom. When he, his brother, Jake, 5, and his sister, Miriah, 4, left hours earlier, on Christmas Eve, their two-story duplex had only two bedrooms, both on the first floor.
Now, 540 minutes later – Christmas morning – the house was opened to the second floor with three new bedrooms. The rooms were filled with curtains and furniture and toys.
A bronze plaque on the wall added to the mystery: A promise is a promise. Love, Dad.
“Who did this?” he asked Mom. “Was it really Dad?”
Sheri Bailey felt her throat tighten. Her son had been grieving for months since the death of his father, Jerry, of brain cancer. When his father died, Josh was holding his hand.
His death had shaken the entire family. But the grief was deeper for Josh, who had prayed hard that God would heal his dad. When Jerry Bailey died, Josh thought maybe it was his fault. Or maybe even that there was not a God.
As Josh looked at his mother now, his eyes were shining with hope.
“Yes,” she said, softly. “Your dad was talking with God about his promise to you kids about giving you each a bedroom. So God found people on earth who could make it happen.”
Josh thought about what she said, and then grinned as he raced up the stairs to see his brand-new bedroom again.
For Sheri Bailey, a widow at 27 with three children, life had been hard, even tragic. But now she could barely believe the miracle before her eyes.
“It was something to think that there were people who cared as much as I did about my kids,” she said. “I was just an everyday Joe to them, and they did this for us.”
Just hours earlier, a host of men, women and teenagers, all wearing pointy elf hats, had worked through the night hammering, tearing down walls, hoisting wallboard and planks out of two tractor-trailers parked in a nearby alley.
It was astounding. Magical. It was a miracle on 15th Street in Kansas City, Kan. Christmas 1998 was a Christmas that the Bailey family would never forget. And it planted a seed.
They wanted to help others, too.
A special mission
For more than a decade a group of anonymous people has worked in secret in the wee hours of Christmas, when most of the metropolitan area slumbers.
Known as the Elves of Christmas Present, their mission is to make Christmas a special time for a terminally ill child who probably will not see another Christmas, or for families who are grieving from a loss.
But they also do this for themselves – it reminds them that Christmas cannot be bought in a store.
Some of the Christmases they have fulfilled for others have made the news. Others have not. But whether they have found a way to pay a family’s $100,000 medical debt or found three single beds for a family that previously had none, the elves believe that the people they help are exactly the ones they were meant to help.
“We have spies everywhere,” said a man known as Chief Elf. “We try to find people who may have fallen through the cracks of normal charities. We try to find people who need an extra-special Christmas. People who need to know that others care.”
Most days Chief Elf and his family live in a house in Olathe, a house where in recent weeks the water pipes burst at the same time the furnace died. Despite the difficulties, the elf work continued just as it has for a decade of Christmases in a little home office named Elf Central.
There is where the details of special Christmases come into sync. There is where the Elves of Christmas Present began as a way for a couple of families to teach their children what it means to give.
“We wanted our kids to see beyond the ‘gimmes’ of receiving gifts,” said a man known as Elf No. 2. So together the two men looked around for some way to do exactly that.
“We tossed around a lot of ideas,” said Elf No. 2. “We thought about bringing blankets to the homeless or serving food somewhere, but other people were doing that. And we didn’t just want to put boxes under a tree. We wanted to be creative. We wanted to add a ‘wow!’ factor to whatever Christmas project we did. The whole idea was to make a difference in someone’s life.
“Then we read a newspaper article about a family whose father died just weeks before Christmas. We knew this was it. They were the ones we were supposed to help. But it was kind of scary making that first phone call.”
Easing a family’s grief
Christmas 1990 seemed bleak for the Scoma family.
On November 19, Ruby Scoma learned that her husband, Anthony, had been killed in an accident at work. It was the day they were to have celebrated their 13th wedding anniversary.
Ruby was left with seven children ranging in age from 13 years to 15 months. The holidays now loomed as a gruesome reminder of what the family had lost.
“For me, I wished that Christmas could just go away,” she said. “But I knew, for the kids, that Christmas had to go on. They were expecting it.”
Then she got a telephone call from a man who said his group wanted to help. Scoma remembers the man explaining what they wanted to do. Then he asked whether her children had anything special they wanted for Christmas. Even a decade later, Scoma tears up remembering the moment.
Just days before his fatal accident, Anthony had told Ruby he wanted to build the children a basketball goal. She told Chief Elf the story.
“That’s it,” he said. ‘We’ll build them that basketball goal. But we’re going to do it on Christmas Eve, after they’re asleep.”
Ruby thought perhaps the man was a little crazy, but she agreed to the plan. As Christmas inched closer, the man called her again, this time to ask whether his group could bring gifts.
Then he called her again and said the group would like to give the children a free shopping trip on the Country Club Plaza, with a ride in a limousine.
“They kept heaping surprise after surprise after surprise,” she said. “But he was always very careful to make sure that I wasn’t overwhelmed.”
On Christmas Eve, after the children had gone to sleep, workers showed up. Working by the illumination of two handheld spotlights, they dug a hole and then poured concrete. By 3 a.m. a gleaming basketball hoop shone under the Christmas moon.
Christmas morning, the Scoma family found hundreds of wrapped gifts, including special presents for Ruby. Baskets of food from an area grocery and restaurants gave them a special breakfast, lunch and dinner, too.
“That Christmas would not have been the same without the kindness of these strangers,” Ruby Scoma said.
“They helped make a painful Christmas into a nice memory that we have never forgotten.”
Most of her children are grown now, and Scoma is a grandmother three times over, but every Christmas Eve the family members recall their very special Christmas. And every year around Christmas, they do something for others, too.
“When people touch your heart, it’s easier to want to reach out back,” Scoma said. “Their kindness changed our family forever.”
A growing army
Through the years, the number of Elves of Christmas Present has swollen to about 650.
Most remain anonymous.
“We can get a whole lot more done when nobody gets the credit,” Chief Elf said. “Most people, when they’re asked, want to do something to help others in need. And when a kid is dying, how can you say no?”
There are, however, a few exceptions to the anonymity rule.
“We have Elves who are lawyers, doctors, judges, police officers, reporters, electricians, artists, musicians – a few are mayors and some are construction workers,” Chief Elf said. “But the Elves who were once helped by the Elves before, well, they’re considered extra-special Elves.”
A dream vacation
Earl Martin tried not to notice when his wife, Joan, seemed a little too tired. He tried to squelch the fear when the new tumors were discovered on her spine. He would not allow himself to project what the future held for his wife and the mother of his two children with every new round of chemotherapy and radiation treatment that failed.
Still, he knew. She did too.
But Joan Martin wanted to have one last special time together as a family – a time to laugh and forget hospital treatments, a time to create a bundle of happy memories. The family would need them during the sad days ahead.
The Martin family’s Christmas miracle arrived on a sunny Mother’s Day 1992 inside a picnic basket holding four Mickey Mouse hats, wedged between the fried chicken and the potato salad.
The Elves of Christmas Present had heard about the family and stepped in to give them the vacation of their dreams: an all-expense-paid trip to Walt Disney World and other attractions in the Orlando, Fla., area. It came complete with free hotel, meals, a rental car and even five days in a condo on a coastal island, where they could walk along the beach and rest up from the bustle of the amusement parks.
Joan Martin died several months later.
The following Christmas, when Chief Elf called to see how the Martins were doing, Earl knew what he wanted to ask:
“Can my boys and I be Elves with you? I have my own construction company. … “
Overnight remodeling
Earl Martin was a little nervous when Chief Elf called him for one Christmas project, especially when he learned what the Elf wanted him to do.
“I thought there was no way we could renovate a second story overnight,” he recalled. “Then I went over to the house with him to meet the mom and to scout out how hard it would be.”
When Martin met Sheri Bailey, he felt as if he were looking at his own family from years before.
“I was a little choked up thinking about what kind of Christmas they would have without us,” he said.
That’s when he determined that, yes, they would indeed renovate her house. They would do it somehow.
Martin became the head contractor for the task, organizing carpenters, decorators, carpet layers, tools, equipment, trucks, wood, caulking and paint.
Everything had to be timed and synchronized. Eight persons would work in an area at a time and then move to another section. The work was done while the children spent the night at a neighbor’s house.
The crew finished the job by 6:30 a.m. Martin had never felt more tired as he drove home, where he collapsed onto a chair. The sky was beginning to turn pink. It was sunrise.
“I remember sitting there in that chair and just grinning,” he said. “I never felt so fulfilled in all my life than in that moment. There’s nothing you can buy or manufacture to capture that feeling. And it’s addicting. I wanted to feel that way every year. That, for me, was Christmas.”
Elves and angels
Three days before this Christmas, Chief Elf peered over his glasses at one of two computer screens. Bleary-eyed, he tried to make out a telephone number. In just 15 minutes he had made a dozen phone calls on one of his three phones. And several times one phone had rung while he was talking on another.
“This is a good day, too,” he said, apologizing that he was too busy to really talk. “The phones are ringing one at a time. The closer we get to the big day, the crazier this place will get.”
His phone calls began before 8 a.m. and continued until nearly midnight.
Assigning hundreds of people various tasks takes time, energy and someone who can tie up all the loose ends.
The phone rang again. Chief Elf picked it up before the first ring was finished.
“Yeah, well, I’m trying to figure out how to make you cold this Christmas Eve,” he said into the phone, and then chuckled. “OK, then. People will start arriving at 6:30.”
Chief Elf had recruited another Elf.
“You have to be a little crazy to be an Elf,” he said. “Elves don’t become Elves just by joining the group. Most of the time, people discover they’ve been Elves all along. They simply find us and attach. Few people are willing to venture out on Christmas Eve to help out a stranger, no matter what the weather conditions are.
“But Elves? They don’t mind at all.”
As in years past, the Elves will pay special visits tonight to several families from Lawrence to Buckner. More than a few will have a Christmas they will never forget. A Christmas that will perhaps transform an otherwise sad time into a special memory. A Christmas during which a dying child will smile. An adult will probably cry.
Scattered around the office at Elf Central are photos of smiling children from past Christmases, children who have since died.
Chief Elf looks at their pictures every day.
“I’ve come to believe that these children are our angels,” he said. “Too many times, an impossible situation comes together in an amazing way. There are too many coincidences for this to just happen. We have lots of angels looking down on us and helping us every year. You can feel them.”
The phone rang again.
“Hello? Hey, we’re looking for some electricians who don’t mind getting cold on Christmas Eve. … “
LEE HILL KAVANAUGH, The Kansas City Star
