The Christmas spirit is alive and well at the Gateway Mall this season. Prescott Mile High Middle School’s National Junior Honor Society (NJHS) traveled to the mall this week to do some Christmas shopping for needy children. NJHS Advisor Stephanie Grotbeck had called ahead to make sure the Salvation Army’s Angel Trees were still decorated with wish lists from area children. But thanks to the generosity of various citizen “angels” in the quad city area the trees were down to one tag. Major Martha Trimmer of The Salvation Army Corp is delighted at the situation, which means that all the children who signed up for the program will get their Christmas wishes.

Trimmer and her husband have been running the Angel Tree program for the Salvation Army for over 20 years, the last 3 in Prescott. On Wednesday morning there was a long line of people outside the mall waiting to pick up the results of the all the hard work the Salvation Army has put into the Angel Tree program. Families signed up to participate back in October and the smiles on their faces were evidence of how much receiving these gifts for their children means to them. Major Trimmer said they would deliver gifts to a total of approximately 600 families this year. The gifts are all new. Every item is checked out with volunteers before it is sorted into a bag for the individual families. Trimmer says it takes over 500 volunteers to pull the program together. Angel Trees are set up day after Thanksgiving and manned during all mall hours. Then several groups come in and help package things by case number for each family.

Denise Buss, Marketing Administrative Assistant at the Gateway Mall is enthusiastic about the program. The nuts and bolts of the Angel Tree program is housed in a vacant store at the mall each year. The space is donated to the Salvation Army and is close by the actual Angel Trees so the volunteers can keep the process going more easily. Buss watches the volunteers working over hundreds of bags of carefully labeled presents and says, “They have it down to a science. It’s amazing.” She pointed out a hard working volunteer who is also a mall employee and said that he brought his wife in to help.

Buss said, “We try to be a community friend.” Macerich, (the parent company of Westcor) encourages its employees to volunteer. “We’ve adopted three charities in the area this year; The Salvation Army, Yavapai Food Bank and Franklin Phonetic School in Prescott Valley. Macerich partners with all sorts of organizations nation wide. Volunteering and giving back to that particular community is very important to them.”

In the meantime Mile High teacher Stephanie Grotbeck had to think quickly. She had 7 groups of parents and students anxious to fulfill the Christmas wishes of area children and no tags on the Angel Tree. The NJHS students had already voted to buy Logos for Ryan Hadley’s Lego Drive sponsored by Prescott eNews, and they were headed to Wal-Mart for that purchase. When another tag showed up on the Angel Tree with a wish list of gloves, scarves and hats one of the groups grabbed that one and set off looking for bargains at the mall. Grotbeck then remembered that Wal-Mart had trees set up for area foster children and sent the rest of the groups over there. The students came back with big smiles as they talked about the gifts they bought for the foster children, Ryan Hadley and the last Angel Tree family. They were all well within their budgets and happy to have helped make Christmas special for children in their community.

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