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Globe Santa: ‘It was like the end of the world’
A family loses everything they owned in a horrific house fire.
One hour. That’s all it took for the fire to wipe out everything they owned: Clothing. Furniture. Mementos. Passports. Toys. Even the family’s pet hamster.
“On April 28, the apartment building where we lived [in Randolph] burned to the ground,” the mother of three writes to Globe Santa. “It doesn’t exist anymore, and everything we had perished.”
The family was already in financial distress, relying on SNAP benefits to eat. But that Sunday evening around dinnertime, a furious fire roared through their apartment complex on Bridle Path Circle, which had no sprinkler system. They had five minutes to get out with their lives.
More than 80 residents were displaced, and the building was subsequently razed. Today, all that remains is a barren tract of land with an idle excavator sitting on it, and a walkway to a building that isn’t there. On the periphery lies the scattered detritus of what may have been the occupants’ old lives – a painted door to an apartment, a shattered window frame, a Christmas tree stand, a toddler’s colorful push walker.
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“It was like the end of the world,” the mother said in an interview.
Yet when she writes Globe Santa, she speaks of how grateful she is. To the people of Randolph who gave them “so much love and support.” To the firefighters who went back the next day and rescued their kitten, Sultan, from their balcony, soaked and covered in black soot.
Also to Globe Santa, who brought her children holiday gifts last year, and who she hopes will remember them again this year. “In our new apartment we have a lot of empty space for new toys you may send us,” she notes in her letter.
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Read enough of these letters to Globe Santa – there are about 16,000 of them so far this year – and you start to recognize patterns. One of these is that for many people, poverty is not only about small incomes. It’s “a relentless piling on of problems,” as the Pulitzer Prize-winning author Matthew Desmond writes in his 2023 book, “Poverty, By America.”
A single mother of an 8-year-old boy is experiencing such a situation. She writes that she was seriously ill last year and needed to take two months off work for emergency surgery. When she went back to work, her car was totaled when another driver ran a stop sign and totaled her car. She was able to get another car but within a month she’d lost her job due to too many sick days.
“I struggled finding another job so I went back to school while on unemployment,” she writes. “My unemployment has run out, I’m still in school, and the only income I have is child support and that’s not enough to survive on. I am extremely stressed and frustrated about not having means to at least do something for my son. I can barely stretch our food for the month. I’m hanging on a prayer that things will improve.”
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Another mother with five kids writes: “My six-year-old son was finally able to get the surgery he needed for his kidney [but]I have to be attentive and watch everything he consumes in order to keep his only kidney healthy for a lifetime. His health issues have made it impossible for me to find a job since I know that at a daycare no one will care for him as I do.”
The boy’s illness has affected her daughter, too. “It has caused her to feel responsible which sometimes makes her go into a depression wishing she could be more helpful in the situation,” she writes. “The holidays are approaching and my only wish is to make my older kids feel special since they probably feel as if I only have more time for [her] brother. Thank you for listening.”
Message received. A helping hand will be extended, in the form of a customized gift box filled with age-appropriate toys, books and games. It’s the promise the Globe Santa campaign has made for nearly 70 years, enabled by generous readers and unnumerable other caring people across greater Boston. We so appreciate each and every donation.
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For 69 years Globe Santa, a program of the Boston Globe Foundation, has provided gifts to children in need at holiday time. Please consider giving by phone, mail, or online at globesanta.org.
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