It’s a small, simple room with plain, beige walls and a few long, folding tables in a one-story building in Aurora.
But it holds the mother lode of Christmas smiles for more than 1,500 needy area children who will receive toy-brimmed stockings next month through the local American Red Cross Holiday Stocking program.
“I wrote one little news release and sent it to some local papers in July and got this tremendous response,” said Susan Monteleone, a community coordinator for the American Red Cross Service Center at its year-old site in Aurora, which covers Will, Kane and Kendall Counties, along with western DuPage County and southwestern Cook County.
“And it has just kept on going,” she said. “It hasn’t stopped, we’re still getting calls.”
Dozens of individuals and groups from 39 communities have cut and sewn stockings from the $600 worth of starched cotton donated by Aurora Bleachery Inc. and are returning their stockings filled with toys.
So, the large sorted stacks of donated games, crafts and books filling tables and the piles of stuffed animals, basketballs and dolls lining the floor at the agency’s service center are the extra toys from drives held at 20 parochial schools that will supplement or even out the returned stockings.
And when Monteleone and others at the center see the stockings that already have been returned with colorful cutouts of snowmen and glittery painted Christmas trees, they feel they are witnessing another unexpected display of generosity.
“It just blew us away,” said Monteleone. “In the past we had just plain cotton stockings.”
Monteleone estimates it would have cost the agency $16,500 to produce the stockings.
The stockings will be distributed through the Aurora-based Holiday Hopes program operated by the Salvation Army and United Way as a one-stop Christmas program for a coalition of Aurora-based social service agencies and churches. Stockings also will be given to smaller Aurora-based agencies like Mutual Ground and Hesed House.
Will County residents will receive stockings at Christmas parties held by several United Way affiliates in Joliet, including Spanish Center and Peter Claver Center, as will children of prison inmates who attend a party to be hosted by the Center for Correctional Concerns.