Macy’s ‘Believe’ Campaign for Make-A-Wish® - Part 4

Location: Macy’s in Water Tower Place

Date: November & December 2012

As we got closer to Christmas, I started checking Macy’s website to see how many letters had been received.  By December 7^th, the count was a little over 542,000, which meant that there still was long ways to go to make it to the $1 Million target, and not too many days left.  I sent a company wide email to my colleagues at work, asking them to participate and irrespective of their age, write a letter to Santa.  I also sent a similar message to my old colleagues in Pittsburgh, as well as some of the other people I knew.  Every wish would help, including my own.

Christmas Morning: When all wishes come true

Macy’s had designated December 14^th as ‘Believe Day’.  All the letters received that day would be worth double.  Thus I had chosen that day to write my letter.  Since I was collecting the letters at the Water Tower Place, I thought about submitting my letter at a different location, the Macy’s on State Street.  I was supposed to go see ‘A Christmas Carol’ that evening and arrived in Macy’s with 40 minutes to spare.  It took me some time to locate the mail box and when I found it, I saw several kids and their parents sitting by the mailbox writing letters with colorful crayons.  I took a postcard, borrowed a pen and sat at a table.  It had taken me some time to frame it, but I had come prepared with the exact wish that I wanted to make.  However as I started writing it down, I felt that is was not what I truly wanted to wish for and at the last moment I changed my wish.  I thought about that as I put the letter in the mailbox.  Sometimes true wishes are made on the spur of the moment and all that you planned for means nothing.  Later as I saw ‘A Christmas Carol’, I realized how that story is about someone who spends his whole life not believing in miracles or the nobility of people and at the end is convinced otherwise.  While I was by no means like Ebenezer Scrooge, I too had been converted from a skeptic to a believer.

I went to visit my friends in Connecticut for Christmas.  They have a three and a half year old boy, and one of the highlights of my trip was to see his anticipation build up days before Christmas. Leading up to it, he had done everything what his parents had said.  He had been nice and had even left milk and cookies for Santa next to the tree the night before. On Christmas morning it was wonderful to see him run down the stairs, pick up the presents by the tree and rip them open to see if Santa had gotten him what he had wished for.  While I had seen the letters, nothing drove home the point more than seeing the sincerity of a child’s belief, and the pure joy when all of their wishes come true.

My final batch

I returned back and made one last journey to Macy’s.  For my final collection I had over 800 letters.  As I laid them out on my apartment floor and counted them, I realized this would be the last  time that I would be doing it.  For the past two months, I had a fixed schedule each week – one which I followed for most parts.  This included picking up the letters from Macy’s at noon on Friday, sorting and counting on Sunday - after which I would send Jeanne an email - and then carrying them with me to office on Monday.  During lunch break on Monday I would walk up to Make-A-Wish offices and drop off the letters.  I had gotten used to this so much, that not doing this moving forward was going to be a strange feeling.  I carried them to Make-A-Wish office and handed them to Jeanne.  I thanked her for the opportunity and said that it had been the single greatest privilege of my life to have carried each of the 3,535 letters that Macy’s at Water Tower Place has received.  She said that she was grateful to have me on their team and would look forward to my participation again, something that I really hope will happen.

One Friday evening I was sitting in a mall coffee shop counting the letters, and one woman looking at what I was doing, asked if I was Santa.  “I’m just an elf”, I had replied.  She said it was great what we were doing and I thanked her.  Overall we had reached our goal and crossed a million letters (1,000,104 to be precise). I was proud to have helped in a small way, though the real heroes were the people – young and old - who had truly believed.  

After my friend’s son had finished playing with his toys that Christmas morning, my friend asked when was it that I stopped believing in Santa. At what age had I realized all of this was made up. I just looked at him and replied, “What do you mean stopped”.