What an amazing cause, my mother taught kindergarten to inner city kids in Manhattan for almost 40 years. I grew up privileged and went to private school, I would go visit my moms school and the conditions were so different from what I experienced at my school. The children loved my mother and she loved them. She always spent quite a bit of her own money on her classroom and  did things for her students like buying them clothes , shoes or donating items that formerly belonged to my sister and me. For year after one student had been out of her class she religiously brought Easter clothes for the girls and her siblings, she did this until the girl was in high school. 

 My  younger sister was inspired by her and for a time was  a special ed teacher. One Christmas a few years ago went holiday shopping, I watched my sis , who is a single mom,  carefully select individual gifts for each of her 10 students. 

I really hope you raise the thousand $- I will pass this along.

The gift I wanted but didn't get was a Tiffany Taylor doll- does that totally date me?  If you don;t know it was this larger than life doll, like a bigger Barbie and about two feet tall- the big ting was that her head and hair could be flipped around to be blond or brunette. I think I whined so much that I got it 3 months later for my birthday and then proceeded to give her a hair cut that, like all dolls, ended up looking like a mohawk. How is it that no matter how many dolls hair we cut, we think the next one is actually NOT going to look like a mohawk but it does???

Happy Holidays, Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, Happy Kwanzaa , Happy Festivus and to my atheists friends Happy Winter Solstice - did I leave anyone out?
-Brooke