It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year: Student Santa

With the beginning of December comes the holiday season, the count down to vacation, and most importantly, the annual Student Santa event. Student Santa is an opportunity for students to give back to the Waltham community by giving gifts to children in need. The event is run by Waltham High School in collaboration with the St. Vincent de Paul Society. The Society arranges with local churches who want to participate to determine the children who need to be serviced. One student from each homeroom volunteers to act as “Santa” and collects donations from their peers, which they use to purchase gifts for their assigned Waltham child in need. The identity of the child is not revealed, but the Santas are told their gender and age to help them choose the perfect gifts. Then, Waltham’s Housing and Building Departments pick up the gifts from the high school to take them to where they are going to be distributed, which this year, will be St. Mary’s church. 

The deadline for bringing in gifts is December twenty-second. Mr. Cox says, “Student Santa day is December twenty-second, that’s a Wednesday… [Student Santas] buy the gifts and then they bring them in that day….That day there is going to be a senior assembly only…we used to run an assembly for each grade but we can’t [because of the schedule]… but everyone else is going to watch. It’s going to be live-streamed, so there will be an assembly showing all of the gifts. And there will be thousands of them, that’s how much we’ll have because we’re buying for three hundred and twenty-five to three hundred and fifty kids, so we’re looking at [about] three thousand gifts.”

Mr. Grinnell, who has been assisting Mr. Cox with the NHS since 1988, shares that the program was, “designed as a school-wide community service project to help less fortunate students/children in Waltham.”

Mr. Cox credits Mrs. Hunt’s Girlscout troop as the origin of the idea. He says, “When she was a young girl…her mother was the Brownie leader and they were looking for something to do on Christmas. So they took up a collection, [and] bought gifts for a couple of families in Waltham who were down on their luck. And at the time Mrs. Hunt’s father, Mr. Goodwin, was a history teacher with me. He was in charge of the student council and I was in charge of the Honor Society. One night [we thought] we should do some kind of new event, and Mrs. Hunt’s mother said, ‘why don’t you get like 10 or 15 needy kids of Waltham and buy gifts for them.’ We said, ‘That’d be a nice idea.’ So the first year we did it was way way back in 1984, and we [serviced] a total of forty-five kids…and we came up with the name Student Santa. That was the year it began and since then it has grown from forty-five, and this year it’ll be about three hundred and forty-five. It’s grown exponentially, and it’s just become a hugely successful program.” 

Mr. Grinnell agrees that the program is a great success because “the students in my classes have always stepped up and have been very generous giving money to buy presents for our adopted child.”

It is a great opportunity for students to get involved and take on a leadership role in their school to support the community because “… it’s not called faculty Santa, its Student Santa. Students collect the money, students buy the gifts, students wrap the gifts, not the adults. This is a student-run program,” explained Mr. Cox.

He notes that the generous holiday spirit has also contributed to the overall success of the program. “It’s a time of year when people think, in a lot of cases, how fortunate they are and how well off they are, and they think of those who might need some help. This is the one program that just about every kid somehow gets involved in, whether donating a little bit of money, or some people are in a position to donate more.”

The event is beneficial to everyone within the Waltham community because students are learning and working together, as well as creating a positive memory for a Waltham child. Mr. Grinnell says, “Over the years I have had students in class who, when they were younger, received gifts from the program and they were very grateful and wanted to pay it forward.”

Not only do former recipients of Student Santa gifts get involved, students who have already graduated from Waltham High also continue to participate. Mr. Cox shares that, “…Even kids who leave here [participate], like one of my former students [who] is at Stonehill right now. She sent me an email and she said, ‘I’ll take a kid.’ We get kids all the time who graduated, kids fifteen years out of school, still taking part in Student Santa. So a lot of them realize it’s a good thing to give back to the community that gave them a lot of benefits when they were young.”

Mollie Curley and Jordan Cononi are the Student Santa’s for Mr. Cox’s advisory in homeroom 269. This is the first time that either one of them has participated in this role. Mollie said she wanted to be Student Santa because she, “[feels] like it’s a good way to give back to the community [because]… it’s every kid’s dream to have so many presents under the tree.” Jordan added on saying, “every kid deserves to wake up on Christmas morning and be happy to receive presents… waking up and seeing a bunch of presents under the tree was like the best day of the year.”

In the end, Jordan’s goal encompasses the purpose of the entire program. “I just hope that I can make some kid’s Christmas better,” she said. Overall, this charity event serves as a heart-warming reminder of the unity within our community.

Photography by: Gates Morton