The Wrap-Up: Merry Miracles 2016

During the holiday season, many families in the Western North Carolina region struggle; not only to provide basic essentials, but to create a cheerful day that other families seem to be having due to gifts and festivities. This Christmas season, we here at the Asheville Blog endeavored to provide children in need with a rich holiday experience that they could not receive on their own. The Merry Miracles program, in its second year currently, is designed to collect physical and financial donations that will later be distributed to families (that do not qualify for traditional assistance) in the form of a shop.

This year, we received wonderful help from local businesses that allowed a donation box to be put in their storefront. We thank these wonderful shops for their help: Eye on Merrimon, Comic Envy, Orbit DVD, Battlecat Coffee, West Asheville Artist’s Co-op, Spellbound Children’s Books, Bruisin’ Ales, and Mitchell’s Tuxedos! We also express our gratitude for the imperative financial donations from Arthur Rutenberg Homes and Kleinco that really provided the necessary funds to fill in our inventory gaps.

After collecting for two weeks, the staff went around to stores to buy items in bulk for the gift store.

Then, from December 22nd until December 23rd, Emily Trimnal and Hannah Klein set up the “pop-up shop” at Fun Depot along with the service of dedicated personal friends. The gift store was arranged by “price” and families were given a certain amount of tickets depending on how many kids they needed to shop for. Each item was priced as either one, two, or three tickets, and after shopping the gifts would be wrapped to take home. (We had some difficult ones to wrap for sure… especially this dinosaur!)

We were extremely startled by the amount of gifts we had collected: almost five hundred! All thanks to the wonderful Asheville community and the work of two women! In fact, there were so many gifts left over that an announcement was sent out to the West Asheville community for those in need of assistance to come on over because we had plenty to spare! Overall, the Merry Miracles program assisted 84 kids in creating an abundant and special holiday season. Once again, we could not have done it without all the support from businesses and individuals alike! Now, time to prepare for next year.