The holidays are a busy time for Child Life because we still have kids coming in with new diagnoses and are performing our clinical work.

We’re also on the frontlines of accepting holiday gifts and donations from the community. It’s also our job to normalize and celebrate holidays because those things are important to children and their families. 

Last year, we took inspiration from our team members at the Plano campus and opened our first Christmas store in the Dallas hospital. Here, we house the donations the community provides us for patients and families. And we help spread the word to our families and that they can “shop” for free from the store for patients and siblings. We have a wrapping station that we set up for them to package their gifts.

The whole point of the store is to give control and power back to families, so they can still pick out gifts for their children and participate in something they might do if they weren’t in the hospital. And we see the impact this has on families to participate in something fun and normal, and for a moment, it takes their minds off why they’re in the hospital.

All of this is possible because of donations from the community. Every donation is special. We wouldn’t be able to do what we do every day if people weren’t so generous.