Getting Help at Christmas

We know that Christmas isn't easy for everyone. Our family and our friends who volunteer to help with this site have all experienced grief during the Holiday season, as well as emotional, financial, and spiritual hardships.

Such experiences have motivated us to provide many free resources to help you build memories and relationships with your family each holiday season, no matter what your circumstances. Our Christmas sites cost us money to operate, but it's our way of "paying forward." We want to help the next generation, as well as people who are new to Christmas or who never had an emotionally healthy Christmas as children, build Christmas memories and traditions with their families.

To further help people beyond our immediate reach, we also support and volunteer for trustworthy national organizations that have "feet on the ground" in your community.

The same organizations are a good place to start looking for Christmas assistance of any kind, including:

• Salvation Army,
• Salvation Army Angel Tree,
• Prison Fellowship's Angel Tree, and
• Toys for Tots.

In addition, if you contact your local church, synagogue, mosque, social services office, etc., they might be able to put you in touch with local or regional resources that we have no visibility into.

Sadly, we have to automatically delete every direct request for money we receive without any response or followup - we just get too many, and every one we have taken time to track down turned out to be from a professional scammer; a few were from dangerous career criminals. So we have chosen to spend our time in ways that keep us and our readers safe, and which help more real people more effectively.

Worse yet, some pages that claim they will help you are really just looking for personal information they can use to perform identity theft or worse. For the safety of your own family, please be very cautious about giving strangers information like the ages and names of your children. If you want to know more about the Internet Christmas scammers who contact us or tell innocent victims to contact us, please click here.

Also, if you keep getting hit up by Christmas "charities" you never heard of and want to do something for folks who really need it, check out our article Make Your Giving Count. In addition, the organizations I listed above can all use volunteers this time of year, if that's the best way for you to give back.

Again, if someone told you that we would "save Christmas" for your family or some such, I am deeply sorry, but we have no control over people who play such cruel tricks on people in hardship.

If you have questions about Christmas traditions, decorations, or music, or anything like that, we will try to help. We certainly do wish you a season of encouragement and grace, and a better year to come.

Paul &co
FamilyChristmasOnline.com