Do you want to do something altruistic for Christmas? Do you want to be a blessing to those who can never reciprocate? “Now why would you want to do that?” you ask. Because the Spirit of Christmas is all about giving, just as Christ gave his life for you!
Have you heard of Angel Tree® Ministry?
Prison Fellowship’s Angel Tree® is the only year-round, nationwide effort that specifically reaches out to the approximately 2.3 million children in the United States whose parents are incarcerated.
Angel Tree® provides holiday care and year-round activities, such as summer camps and mentoring relationships, through its network of thousands of local churches across the country, to help break the intergenerational cycle of crime and reconcile offenders. prisoners and their children.
Angel Tree® is about reconciliation between parents and children and families helping families. Thousands of church families across the country “adopt” a child from Angel Tree each Christmas and provide much-needed assistance and love, on behalf of the incarcerated parent.
By all measures, the children of prisoners are the most at-risk children and youth in the United States. Studies show that the children of prisoners are five to seven times more likely to end up in prison themselves. (US News & World Report, April 2002 and Bureau of Justice and Statistics 2000) Angel Tree® is an important way to reach out to these children who are struggling to deal with the anger, grief, and disappointment they may feel due to their parents’ incarceration.
Prison Fellowship’s Angel Tree® Ministry partners with 12,000 churches each year. These churches put up a Christmas tree in their foyer and then decorate it with paper angels, each bearing the name, gender and age of a child whose parent is incarcerated. (I always choose a boy because I am familiar with children’s toys and clothing.) You choose an angel, look at the information, and then go shopping! This is great for those who don’t have young children home for Christmas. It sort of gets the juices going and creates that Merry Christmas mood!
Angel Tree® is celebrating its twenty-fifth anniversary this year! It was started in 1982 by a modern day “Bonnie” (of Bonnie and Clyde fame), Mary Kay Beard. Mary Kay knew everything she needed to know about banks, safes, and guns. She spent years of her life on the run and on the FBI’s “most wanted” list.
But finally, the boldness and arrogance of Mary Kay caught up. She crossed the mob on a diamond heist, and they signed a contract on her life.
Fortunately, the FBI found her first and arrested her in Peoria, Illinois. Within a few days, her orders began to arrive at the jail. In addition to 11 federal indictments, four states filed 35 charges against her, ranging from grand theft to armed robbery. She was told that she would spend between 75 and 180 years behind bars for her.
But he didn’t. Released after serving less than six years, she soon married ex-prisoner Don Beard and joined Prison Fellowship as area director for Alabama, where she created Angel Tree® twenty years ago this Christmas.
Mary Kay grew up with a Christian mother and an abusive alcoholic father. She was a high achiever in school, became a nurse, and then married the best safe cracker in America. She didn’t think that her mistakes would affect her, but of course she was wrong.
While in prison, he noticed that other inmates kept trial-size shampoos, toothpastes, and soaps that they would wrap up and save for Christmas when their children visited. It occurred to him that children don’t care what the gift is as long as they know they are the first loved ones. That was the beginning, like a small mustard seed, in his heart of a prison ministry that reached out to children.
She received her Master’s in Education in 1982. She then received a new challenge, from Chuck Colson’s Prison Fellowship, to become its first Alabama state director and the first woman to hold a state leadership position in Prison Fellowship. After carefully praying about the offer with friends at her church, Mary Kay joined the Prison Fellowship staff in April 1982.
One of his first jobs was to devise a Christmas project. Their churches and volunteers asked which prisons they would visit and what gifts they would accept. Mary Kay said, “Everybody does that. Let’s do something different!”
Christmas trees in the vestibules of churches decorated with red angels for the girls and green angels for the boys. And the rest is history. Angel Tree Ministry was on its way!
Since the program’s inception in 1982, more than 7.5 million children of prisoners have received some 14 million angel tree gifts nationwide.
For information on how to get involved, visit www.angeltree.org or call 1-800-55-ANGEL.
You’ll be glad you got involved! It’ll get that holiday stalemate out of your heart, and some lonely kid will get all those great gifts you bought. They will tell him that they belong to his imprisoned father and he will know that they truly love him even if mom or dad is in prison. What a gift!
Offered by April Lorier, 2007