From blankets for the homeless to homemade biscuits, Central NY is spreading holiday kindness

Syracuse, N.Y. — In September, it seemed like Christmas might not come to St. Lucy’s.

Thieves broke into the warehouse where the church was storing piles of gifts parishioners bought throughout the year to prepare for their annual Christmas giveaway. Hundreds of families in one of the city’s poorest neighborhoods have depended on the church to help them put presents under their trees for 18 years.

In one night, it was all gone. The thieves took everything but the hangers the clothes were on and the bins they were stored in, said Kay Scharoun, who helps run the event.

“We were left with nothing,” she said. The haul was about $18,000 worth of presents. Scharoun could not fathom how they could amass the same bounty in less than three months.

But they did: On Dec. 2, 250 families, roughly 1,000 people, shopped in St. Lucy’s for presents, clothes and household items. There was more than enough for everyone.

“We rose from the dead,” Scharoun said. The kindness of friends and strangers replaced what the thieves stole, and even left the church with some extra money to find a safer storage spot. The church raised $25,000 for the new gifts through a GoFundMe campaign where Scharoun shared the story of what happened.

Social media and Syracuse.com helped the story reach across the state and the nation.

“There is a lot of goodness,” Scharoun said.

She is right.

St. Lucy’s event was one of hundreds of acts of kindness in Central New York this holiday season.

Some were so large they needed an entire convention center. Others were as small and simple as a mailbox in a little town.

There were school gyms full of donated presents, organized and passed out by earnest volunteers.

There are beds built and delivered by volunteers, held together by donated screws, hoping to save children from sleeping on the floor as winter moves in. Stockings painstakingly hand-lettered with children’s names on them and filled with snacks and toys. A truckload of donated food to hold families over.

Warm, fresh blankets left in places where homeless people sleep. A free food-truck for New Year’s Day, donated by a businessman with his own pain.

Some of the givers come from a place of plenty, but many are still in need, themselves.

Syracuse.com | The Post-Standard caught up with a fraction of the people who have been spreading joy in our communities this holiday season. In a year where money has been tight for many and laughter sometimes hard to find, these people reached out and offered kindness.

Keri Lynn Courtwright has spent weeks writing children’s names on Christmas stockings in green and red glitter. It is one thing to get a stocking, but another to get one clearly made just for you. Her organization, Pay It Forward CNY, is a massive and loose-knit collection of volunteers across the Syracuse area who do their best, year-round, to help each other. The Christmas giveaway grows every year.

This year, Courtwright decorated more than 100 stockings. The group raised money and collected donated toys for 227 children. Some of them are from families who simply needed a boost this year. Others are homeless and being helped by Chadwick House and We Rise Above the Streets, other nonprofits that Courtwright partnered with.

After the deliveries were done, the organization still had enough to share with Mary Nelson for her Christmas Giftaway at Nottingham High School Dec. 23, and with CNY Blessing Box.

When 17-year-old Wyatt Luchsinger died of cancer in October, the Fayetteville-Manlius community raked the family’s lawn and decorated the house for fall while the family was at his calling hours. They brought food for his celebration of life.

That kindness continued for Christmas, and extended past his family in his honor. Earlier this month, Wyatt’s mother, Kadi Luchsinger, received a note from her friends Patty and Mike Palladino.

“Wyatt’s Christmas” it read at the top. The couple, whose children also attended F-M, paid off the school lunch debts of students at F-M in Wyatt’s class to honor the teen’s kindness to others. It was signed “The caring, funny, honest and inclusive heart of Wyatt this holiday season.”

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The Salvation Army’s Christmas Bureau is the area’s largest Christmas giveaway. Every year, days before Christmas, more than 2,000 families come to get presents for their children, food for a Christmas meal and the week that follows. People line up outside hours before the event starts, often before the sun rises. Centro runs special buses just for the event.

Nearly 1,000 volunteers come to help families shop tables that are painstakingly laid out to make it easier to find that special Lego set or doll. The event is funded, in part, by the Old Newsboys Hope for the Holidays campaign and the bell ringers. The campaign raised $43,000 to buy presents and food last year. It is still working toward its goal this year, and donations can be made here.

The region’s largest Christmas dinner operation is run by the Rescue Mission. Every year, the organization serves Christmas dinner to 300 people on Christmas Day at 11 a.m. They also will deliver another 2,800 meals in Onondaga County. The homeless assistance organization has a shelter for up to 165 people, and serves three free meals a day to anyone who shows up, no questions asked.

PEACE Inc.’s Eastside Family Resource Center has a more intimate holiday meal for its community.

The preparations began last week, when staff made the menu, shopped for the food and started cooking it in the center’s kitchen.

Staff members make all of the dishes and then serve everyone who shows up. This year’s banquet was attended by more than 75 people on Tuesday afternoon. The extensive menu included spinach and crab cheddar biscuit bombs, turkey and baked homemade macaroni and cheese.

A block away that same day, Kamya Baker’s family was pushing their air mattresses into the living room. The pile of them were set aside to deflate later. That’s because the five kids would not need them anymore.

Sleep in Heavenly Peace was delivering new beds for the 16-year-old and her siblings.

The delivery was one of two the city-based volunteer organization was making that day. Volunteers have been setting up beds at a frantic pace this month, trying to get the final 300 beds of the year set up before the floors where so many Syracuse children sleep get cold.

“We’re trying to do as much as we can so we’re able to get kids a bed before the hard winter shows up,” said David Hoalcraft, who oversees the bed building for Sleep in Heavenly Peace.

By the end of the year, the group will have delivered more than 1,200 beds to kids in Syracuse and Central New York who have been sleeping on the floor.

The beds are built by volunteers who often include the kids that will sleep on them. Kamya helped put her own bed together this week when volunteers arrived to set up.

The screw she held, and every other piece of hardware on every bed made by the nonprofit was donated by a local company: Hiawatha Screws and Fasteners. The Syracuse area family business has been donating all of the hardware for every bed, more than 30,000 screws a year, since just after Sleep in Heavenly Peace first began in 2018.

Kids at Holy Cross School in DeWitt raised money for Sleep in Heavenly Peace this holiday season, too. Fifth- and sixth-graders in the Caring Crusaders club at the Catholic School raised money for that organization and others, and bought presents for the babies and mothers at Joseph’s House. They also made 100 bag lunches that would be handed out by the Samaritan Center, complete with notes of joy and extra socks. Staff at the Cheesecake Factory restaurant pitched in to help them out.

On Wednesday, just days before Christmas, Mara Yuzwak and other staff at the Expeditionary Learning Middle School in the Syracuse school district were setting up a Christmas bazaar where students can shop for their families, for free.

Yuzwak said the school sets up a Christmas bazaar every year so students, many from the city’s poorest neighborhoods, can select a few gifts to give to their parents and siblings. This year, she was collecting hundreds of mugs from anywhere and everywhere, to include in the selection.

To be able to give is its own gift. Karina Petsche knows that. She’s needed help from the Christmas Bureau in hard years. But this year, she and her two sons have been driving around looking for people in need of warmth.

Earlier this month, the back of their car was stuffed with 30 blankets, neatly folded into plastic bags. A note was visible through the bags, instructing anyone who found the blanket that it was not lost, but for them.

“If you find yourself in need, go ahead, please open me,” the note reads. Petsche and her boys, who are 13 and 10, gave the blankets directly to some people and left others in spots where they had seen homeless people in the past.

“We really just wanted to do more for the holidays,” Petsche said. “There have been times when I needed help.”

On Monday morning, Darlene Medley was sorting through boxes of lead poisoning literature on her porch and talking over different Christmas events she had been helping with.

“Times are tight,” she said. Medley helps year-round, but she also needs help sometimes. This day, she was getting a delivery of a few Christmas presents from CNY Pay it Forward.

On Sunday afternoon, she was the giver, helping with a community dinner and gift giveaway put on by several Southside groups at McKinley-Brighton Elementary School.

Medley also volunteers year-round with Syracuse Families for Lead Freedom Now; her 7-year-old twins suffered from lead poisoning when they were toddlers and are still dealing with the damage.

Sometimes, the gift is magic. There’s a hand-painted mailbox at the Four Corners Food Co-Op in the village of Waterville where kids can mail letters to Santa and get a letter back from one of his elves.

The store began offering the direct line to the big guy this winter after artist Mary Beth Vandenbergh painted it. Suzanne Sheppard said Santa has received 25 letters so far, and had the elves help with replies to all of them.

“It’s been really cool to see the little faces of excitement,” Sheppard said. The elves will continue to answer any letter that comes, right up until Christmas, but the responses might not come until a little later because Santa and his elves are so busy delivering presents.

On Syracuse’s West Side, volunteers with the Brady Market have delivered 250 boxes with the makings for Christmas dinner.

Businesses and community organizations from across the city and the suburbs helped the nonprofit by donating food, boxing it up and providing delivery services.

Staff from National Grid, The Titi Fund, Pathfinder Bank, Fidelity’s local branch and JMA Wireless helped provide funds and volunteers.

Teens from St. Joseph Catholic Church in Camillus also helped by collecting hams for the dinners.

Brady Barrett, Lily Francisco, Zoe Maupin, and Jack Landau came up with the “Hams for Fams” drive , collecting 60 hams (and one turkey) earlier this week during for the Brady Market dinners.

Cindy Heath, who leads the youth group at St. Joseph’s, also brought a larger group of teens to a class at Webster Elementary School in the city on Wednesday. All of the youth bought and built Build-a-Bear stuffed animals for each child in the class. They delivered the bears and stayed to play with the third-graders.

As school and work wind down in preparation for Christmas, the volunteers are still working.

On Saturday morning, Jan Maloff will host the 27th annual bike giveaway at Fowler High School. It starts at 10 a.m. There are no registration or income requirements. Anyone who needs a bike can get one.

Later that day is perhaps the last Christmas giveaway event of the year: Mary Nelson’s Youth Center Christmas Gift Away is Saturday from 1 to 5 p.m. at Nottingham High School. Nelson and other volunteers have collected more than 5,000 gifts for children. The event is by registration only, and the registration is now closed.

Nelson, who hosts and manages Amazon box giveaways throughout the year, is also hosting a new event on New Year’s Day.

That’s when Mark Braun and Mark Edwards, owners of the two different Doug’s Fish Fry companies, will bring food trucks to Nelson’s youth center. The trucks will be parked from 1 to 5 p.m., serving up free fried fish for the community. They’ve also made up shirts to sell that will raise money for Nelson’s Youth Center and John Tumino’s In My Father’s Kitchen, which delivers food and services to the area’s hardcore homeless who live outside.

Braun said they plan to deliver food to those in need who cannot get to Nelson’s center.

Braun owns Doug Fish Fry in Cortland and runs a Doug’s Fish Fry food truck. Edwards owns the Doug’s in Skaneateles.

The idea began with Braun, who lives in Florida most of the time now, running an Air BNB business on Sanibel Island. That business was nearly destroyed by the hurricane in 2022, Braun said.

Braun, an alcoholic, had been in recovery for years, but began drinking again. In August, he hit bottom, he said. His family helped him see he needed rehab.

In the months that followed, Braun’s business and his soul began to recover. And he started to see that he could do more to help others.

He decided to do it on New Year’s Day with Nelson and Tumino. Braun is hoping for a crowd, so he asked Edwards to help, too. Edwards gladly signed on.

Braun’s fresh start would be a present for others on the first day of 2024.

“I need to be more about helping others. Instead of saying it,” Braun said, “I wanted to do it.”

Marnie Eisenstadt writes about people and public affairs in Central New York. Contact her anytime email | 315-470-2246.