The task, as Nikki Maucere tells it, felt daunting.
“Make sure and get some gifts and wrap them for yourself,” she recalls them saying. “Otherwise, your kids might have a meltdown when they see you have nothing to open.”
Until that moment, Maucere hadn’t considered the reminder her empty hands might bring her 3-year-old son and 6-year-old daughter on Christmas morning. She hadn’t thought about how single parents, whether made that way through death, divorce or other circumstances, had to feign surprise when they opened gifts they had bought and wrapped.
“I thought the task sounded really sad, and I didn’t want to do it,” Maucere recalls. “I thought, ‘No one should have to do this.’ ”
While considering her options, she saw a post on a Facebook page from a woman with an organization that aimed to help single parents during the holidays. Maucere decided to take a pride-swallowing chance. She reached out with a request: If she provided the money, would someone with the organization be willing to pick out and wrap a gift for her?
But she was told the organization wanted to provide presents for children, not adults.
“I thought of it as more of a gift for my children,” Maucere explains, as if she has to, as if it’s not obvious that asking a stranger for a wrapped candle or a pair of slippers is less about her wants than her children’s needs. “To see me open gifts lets them have the emotional security to know I’m still loved, I’m still taken care of, even though Daddy is gone.”
Many organizations right now are gathering gifts to give children to make sure they have something to open on Christmas Day. Those efforts are needed. Too many heartbreaking “Dear Santa” letters go unanswered each year.
But after receiving that rejection last December, Maucere started an effort aimed at getting gifts to a population that isn’t normally asked what they want for Christmas — widows and widowers left to raise children on their own, along with other single parents.
An online search won’t lead you to a website that neatly sums up the effort. One doesn’t exist. But that hasn’t stopped people from finding out about it and wanting to be a part of it. Call it a movement. Call it a community. Whatever you call it, just know that in recent days clusters of “Fairy Godmothers” have started to form in places across the country, and one of those places is Northern Virginia.
Julie Misisco, who lives in Reston, Va., met Maucere, who lives in the Dallas area, through a parenting group when they were both pregnant with their daughters.
At the time, neither knew they would both become young widows.
Misisco’s daughter, Lucy, is now 7 and her son, Scott, is 10, but when she lost her husband, Pete Misisco, to a heart attack nearly four years ago, they were just 3 and 6. At the time, and in the years that followed, Misisco hadn’t considered how a lack of Christmas presents for her could take away from their experience.
Then, last year, a package arrived at her doorstep.
Maucere had turned to Facebook to pair up people willing to give gifts, whom she dubbed “Fairy Godmothers,” with single parents who would welcome receiving them. She called those people “Cinderellas” and “Cinderfellas” — and she added Misisco’s name to that list.
“A couple weeks later, I got a package and it contained a bunch of little gifts for me, as well as a card,” Misisco recalls. “That meant the world to me.”
It also meant something to her daughter and son. One of her children had once wrapped up a used potholder to put under the tree for her, and the other had made something from Legos. When those surprise presents arrived, they exclaimed, “You got something you can open with us!”
This year, Misisco decided to replicate the effort for people in the D.C. region. A few days ago, she posted on a few social media pages a link to the form where people could sign up to receive gifts and a link to the “Fairy Godmothers DC” Facebook page, where people who wanted to give gifts could get information.
“Thank you in advance to everyone who volunteers this year and will help to make a single parent feel seen and appreciated,” she wrote. “I am excited to bring this to the DC area, and can’t wait to see how it goes!”
A day later, when we spoke, she described herself as “blown away by the response.” She had heard from more than 55 people who wanted to buy presents.
She had also started to receive forms from single parents interested in participating. Economic hardship is not a requirement for signing up. She and Maucere describe the effort as filling a “heart need,” not a “financial need.”
The form asks parents to list some of the items they might like. So far, the forms that have come in contain small asks. Among them: perfume, a recipe book, penguin socks, hair ties and oatmeal raisin cookies.
“There have also been a couple who have said that they don’t care, as long as their children are happy,” Misisco says.
On her Facebook page, Maucere writes openly about her grief. In one post, she describes making a favorite family meal again.
“Why would I not make a favorite, especially easy meal for more than a year, you ask? Because that was what I made the night before Craig’s accident,” she writes. A lot of grief work, she points out, involves small things. “It’s making that meal again. It’s going to their favorite place. It’s allowing yourself to laugh. It’s smiling at a picture for the first time since they left instead of crying. It’s finally finishing, alone, that show you started together. It’s writing ‘passed away July 2020’ next to your child’s father’s name on their ‘about my family’ form for school.”
Last December, when Maucere started the “Fairy Godmothers” effort, 60 people received gifts. This year, just in her region, more than 100 people have already volunteered to buy presents. She has also heard from people in several states who have started the effort in their communities.
Maucere knows there is probably a more streamlined way to organize the gift giving than the system she created, but she didn’t want to put the idea on hold while she figured that out.
“Sometimes, you just have to start,” she says. “You don’t have to wait for things to be perfect. You don’t have to buy the domain name and build the perfect website.”
You also don’t need a “Fairy Godmother” effort in your region to help single parents, she says: “An even better thing to do is if you know a single parent or a widow, ask if you can borrow their kids for a few hours and take them shopping for their parents.”
They won’t even need a list, because as every parent knows, there is no guessing wrong.
When forced to pick items they might want for Christmas, none of the parents in the D.C. region put down needs. Some of the things they wrote: fresh flowers (favorites are orchids), dark chocolate, a geometric-patterned scarf, bath bombs and a hairbrush.
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