Valley elves get busy at Special Santa workshop

PALMER — Mari Jo Parks likes to give out titles to the people who help her with the Special Santa Program, like Elf Workshop Coordinator and Assistant Chief Elf.

So what name could Parks, the Chief Elf Organizer herself, give to Duane Clark? Elf landlord perhaps?

Clark brings in Christmas trees from Port Orchard, Wash., every year. This year his trees are in the old Salvation Army store space in the former Carrs shopping center in downtown Palmer.

He didn’t need the whole space, so when he found out Parks needed room for the toys, he gave her half of his space. Well, more than half, actually.

“I don’t require the whole building,” Clark said.

Parks said Clark was a godsend.

“This has been the worst year ever trying to find a location,” she said.

And it’s kind of a nice symbiosis. The elves get a pine-scented workspace and Clark gets a bump in foot traffic.

Elves for life

If you’re unfamiliar with Special Santa, it’s the program that pretty much has the lock on providing Christmas presents to families that otherwise would not get any.

“We work with all the agencies that work with families in need,” Parks said.

That includes organizations like churches, the Salvation Army and the various food banks. The group is also the Valley coordinator of the U.S. Marine Corps’ Toys for Tots program.

Last year, they served 3.710 children. Since it was first organized in 1997, Special Santa has served 21,000 children.

The way it works is that each child fills out a wish list. The elves then fulfill those wishes from the piles of toys they have on hand. Each kid gets two toys, a new book, winter clothes if they need them and a new book.

“Even if they say they don’t want books, we sneak them into the bag,” joked Elf Librarian Ann Meyer.

Surveying the Elf Library, Parks was struck by an odd juxtaposition of three shelves stacked on top of each other, labeled “hunting,” “religious” and “comics” respectively.

“I just think it’s funny that those three are in a row,” she said.

Meyer’s son, Ben Meyer, said that the program orders its books from a group that provides books to nonprofits at cost — just 45 cents apiece.

“That’s why we can do this,” he said.

As she led the tour out of the library a pair of teenagers — Nicole and Josh Trouy — stopped Parks to ask where to put a battery-operated Toy Story toy.

“They’re a great example of teenagers who heard about the program and thought, ‘we want to come play … er … work,’” Parks said.

How to help

Parks said that anyone who wants to help should head to the Special Santa web page at specialsanta.org. The website is where they can sign up to volunteer, to sponsor a family, donate money or find a list of things the program needs.

New this year, Special Santa and the Frontiersman are working on a campaign for folks who don’t want anything for Christmas — Give My Gift to A Child.

“If somebody says, ‘what do you want for Christmas?’ I’m going to say, ‘give my gift to a child,’” Parks said.

Those folks can just direct the would-be gift-givers to that same website.

And, if you need help, the website also has the forms to get toys for your young ones.

Why she does it

Parks said that being Chief Elf Organizer is a lot of work. In her life it runs from June to February with multiple events shoehorned in that time. The annual Halloween Hallow is the program’s main fundraiser each year.

She said she’s rearranged her whole life to take on a volunteer position. And when people ask her why she does it, she points to concrete examples of the good it does.

“We got this letter that I cannot read out loud because it’s so touching,” Parks said.

The writer says that earlier in her life she donated to Special Santa, but circumstances last year made her a single mother with teenaged children and a 3-year-old.

“She could barely make ends meet,” Parks said.

So she leaned on Special Santa, came in for the giant black bag — they collect the toys in garbage bags so kids can’t see what’s inside — and took it out to the parking lot. As she left a volunteer ran out with a gigantic teddy bear. Her 4-year-old had asked for a bear.

On Christmas morning the girl came downstairs and saw it.

In the letter, the woman says that when her daughter came into the living room Christmas morning, she “saw him next to the tree with a huge bow and her name on him she cried, ‘for me?’ I tear up now just thinking about it. ‘What I always wanted, a bear big enough to hold me!’ She is 4 now and curls up in his lap every night to read. He has become the sixth member of our family.”

It’s easy, Parks said, to do the nine months worth of work to focus on logistics, sending elves out to buy ice skates or dropping thousands of dollars in the Walgreens toy aisles.

But letters like that remind her what Special Santa is all about.

“We’ve created memories for a lifetime,” she said. “Who wouldn’t want to do that?”

Contact Andrew Wellner at 352-2270 or andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com.