Single mom asks Goodfellows to help daughters have some joy at Christmas

Happiness seemed to have found Sandra when she came to the United States from Mexico years ago. She found her husband and they had four children together.

However, alcohol and drugs soon took over her husband’s life and took the place of the beauty once surrounding them.

“He began to change. He drank alcohol more frequently and became violent,” she recalled. “I started to work more to be able to raise money and abandon him. He didn’t realize because he was drugged all the time. It was a desperate situation.

“I looked for help, but he refused and I couldn’t handle that situation anymore and I left him.”

Sandra and her daughters went to a shelter, where they lived for three months during the COVID-19 pandemic. She still has a restraining order against her ex-husband and has now been able to return home and live peacefully.

However, times are tough financially, as they are with many single mothers.She wants her daughters to have some joy at Christmas like other children.

The Goodfellow Fund can help. As they have done in Tarrant County since 1912, the Star-Telegram charity has a goal of helping 13,000 children in need in the county have a nice Christmas by providing a $50 tax-free gift certificate for each child for new clothing from Old Navy.

About the Goodfellow Fund

The story on the Goodfellow website describes its beginning as an offshoot of the first newspaper charity drive in the United States, started by the Chicago Tribune on Dec. 10, 1909. A Chicago city attorney wrote a letter challenging his friends to donate the money they would have spent on holiday partying to charity.

A couple years later, the Advertising Club of Fort Worth staged the first local Goodfellow campaign. On the day after Thanksgiving in 1912, Publisher Amon G. Carter brought the tradition to the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.

To find out more, or to learn more about helping, visit goodfellowfundfw.com. The post office box for donations and correspondence is P.O. Box 149, Fort Worth, TX. 76101.