Every year, generous people make a beautiful thing happen: The Christmas Store at Mile High Ministries.

This is the 30^th anniversary for the Christmas Store! Thirty years ago we threw together a makeshift store at the last minute after Thanksgiving, in response to a handful of moms who were crestfallen that they didn’t have money to buy gifts for their kids. These moms (and a handful of dads) didn’t want a giveaway program. But they did want to provide for their kids from their own very meager means.

From that modest beginning the Christmas Store grew to serve hundreds of families each year, and has been replicated by a handful of other organizations across the Front Range. Together, we’ve found the Christmas Store to be a way to be generous AND to protect the dignity of parents who are struggling financially.

As you can imagine, Covid-19 precautions require us to adapt. Instead of a festive one-day event gathering hundreds of shoppers and volunteers, we’ll schedule shoppers for individual 20-minute “shopping sprees” over two weeks. We’ll still decorate the community room at Joshua Station, and stock the shelves with a generous array of carefully-planned new toys and other gifts. Parents will be treated to a peaceful time with the store all to themselves!

As always, our shoppers will pay only about a quarter of retail price. They’ll walk out with armfuls of presents they chose themselves—plus the satisfaction of knowing THEY did a good job providing for their kids! With so many parents unemployed in 2020 and behind on rent and other bills, it feels like a critical time for this empowering encouragement.

Your donation to the Christmas Store makes the whole thing possible. Each gift of $100 provides toys for two children. We’re planning for 350 kids, so if you can help again this year by making a gift to the Christmas Store, we’ll be very grateful—as will the moms and dads (and kids, of course!) who won’t know your name, but will benefit from your generosity.

We may be changing our format, but what hasn’t changed is the way that the Christmas Store celebrates the birth of our Lord, who “comes meek and lowly, appearing first to the poor and humble, offering us all what we could never afford to buy.” Thank you for celebrating with us through your generosity.