At Children’s Hospital Colorado, the holidays are staffed by volunteers who show up with armloads of toys.
They come because a child in a hospital at Christmas should have something to open. Because no family should be sitting in a sterile room thinking about everything they’re missing while other people are home by their trees. These are people who decided, at some point, that this mattered enough to give their holiday afternoon to a child they had never met.
Emmy was in and out of Children’s Hospital through the winters of 2016 and 2017. The volunteers were there. The toys were there.
This is what community looks like at scale: thousands of small commitments by people who don’t know your family, don’t know your child’s name, but show up anyway because they made a decision to show up for all of them. Their consistency is a form of love that does not require introduction.