Our store has been blessed by holiday book angels, more than a hundred of them this year. Book angels are the people who bought books from our snowflake tree. Each snowflake represented a child who otherwise wouldn’t have gotten a book this holiday season. Thanks to the overwhelming generosity of our customers, we helped select, wrapped and delivered well over 150 books to kids in need.<\/p>\n
Our book angel program started years ago when we worked with the Charlotte Food Shelf. Our goal was to give every family who used the Food Shelf during the holidays some books. We’d get the ages and sex of the kids (no first names, as ours is a very small town, and there needed to be some anonymity) and we’d make paper snowflakes for each child. Customers would pick a snowflake, buy a book or two at a discount, and we’d wrap and deliver the books to the Food Shelf in time for the holiday basket delivery.<\/p>\n
The first year we had maybe 25 kids. This year, we worked with the Food Shelf, the Lund Family Center and the Northeast Family Institute. We had more than 90 kids who needed books, a high number that represents just what this economic downturn has done to families. The nicest part of this program was the families who picked books together, and seeing eager nine-year-olds carefully selecting their favorite books in the hopes that another child would like as much as they did.<\/p>\n
I’d love to hear what kinds of programs other stores do. My other favorite part of the Snowflake program is I get to wear a Santa hat, pretty much every day, and that’s a good thing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Our store has been blessed by holiday book angels, more than a hundred of them this year. Book angels are the people who bought books from our snowflake tree. Each snowflake represented a child who otherwise wouldn’t have gotten a book this holiday season. Thanks to the overwhelming generosity of our customers, we helped select, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-572","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/572","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=572"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/572\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=572"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=572"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=572"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}