Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, December 2, 1993 TAG: 9312020169
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV-1 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
SOURCE: STEPHEN FOSTER
DATELINE: CHRISTIANSBURG LENGTH: Medium
"That's just the way Grandpa was," says the chipper mother of three. Sometimes, her excitement bubbles over as she rushes to get all her words out.
She ends her conversations with a gleeful "Thanks hon'."
This Christmas, her exuberance will be answered with heartfelt, even tearful thanks of parents who'll get to watch their children's faces light up when they awaken to find presents under the Christmas trees.
Because the spirit of Santa Claus lives in Letner.
About three weeks ago, Letner walked into Wal-Mart and told her 4-year-old daughter and 7-year-old son to pick out some gifts to place in the Toys-for-Tots box near the doorway.
They did. A good deed done.
Problem was, when Letner returned a week later, those gifts - a Nerf basketball set, a doll, and two cartoon books - were still the only ones in the box.
"My daughter was saying, `I thought you said people would help, mom,"' Letner says. "How do you explain to your kids that people just don't have the time?"
Dismayed, she decided to organize. She wanted to "adopt" families that needed help to make Christmas merry. She talked to the town police chief, who referred her to the Voluntary Action Center in Blacksburg.
"I said, `Kick me two families," Letner told center's director. The first was a family with six boys.
Letner, a waitress at Cracker Barrel, enlisted her co-workers to help out. Lickety-split, those six boys would be getting gifts their parents wouldn't have been able to afford. Letner asked for more families.
The gifts started piling up in a back office at Cracker Barrel, but when they reached the ceiling they had to be moved. Now, a popcorn-festooned Christmas tree dominates the dining room corner, with around 180 - almost $1,300 worth - gifts littered beneath and stacked to the side.
Letner wrapped most of them: shirts, shoes, and yes, toys. "You can't look under that tree without thinking, `Wow!'"
Come Christmas, nigh 30 kids - some of then already prepared for a barren Christmas morn - will reap the joy of her efforts.
"It's just going to be wonderful," says one parent, who asked that her name not be used. The woman, a mother of four with one on the way, and her husband, a local police officer, had already told their children there wasn't any money for presents this year.
"We try to work real hard," she says. "Things just cost too much." They've been strapped before, but this was going to be their first giftless Christmas.
No longer.
"We look at it as an absolute blessing," says the woman, who is taking some of the family's worn out clothes and stuffed animals to the Montgomery County Christmas Store, which will serve even needier families. "God - he just does this type of thing for us."
"It's sort of like the old Christmas movies," she says. "If we all did that, there'd be much less misery and hardship in the world."
Letner got the families' names came from Marcy Schnitzer, director of the Voluntary Action Center, which works as a go-between for various agencies and people who want to help other people.
"We get in new names every day," Schnitzer says. There's thousands of local families poor to the point where a chance for a merry Christmas is in jeopardy.
"There's probably dozens who aren't receiving services," Schnitzer says, "and that's where people like this can help." The effort of the Letners and the restaurant is the largest organized effort she could recall in recent years.
"I've hit everybody that has a paycheck back there," says Letner, motioning toward restaurant's kitchen. She figures about 70 percent of the 142 employees have chipped in; Letner keeps their names, a list of gifts and the families they'll go to in a three-ring binder.
The restaurant's manager, Rick Dublin, says he wants to challenge other area restaurants and businesses to make their own efforts. "If somebody had 5,000 employees, what could they tackle?"
"Next year I'm gonna make an all out attack," Letner vows.
For now, gifts keep coming in, and Christmas Eve she'll be driving around reindeer-driven sleigh, er, pickup truck, delivering boxes and boxes of gifts.
"We're probably going to be up until 2 in the morning playing Santa Claus," she says.
by CNB