Longtime Christmas tradition runs deep for Peters Township family
Jessy Parham (left) and her younger sister, Alyssa, prepare to deliver the gifts to the designated drop-off zone before Christmas.
Last year, the gifts given to the foster kids were accompanied by personalized stockings.
What started as a phone call several states away nearly a decade ago has turned into a Christmas tradition over the past nine years for two McMurray sisters and their family.
Jessy and Alyssa Parham received a call from their father, Bill, in October 2008 after he witnessed something special in a Residence Inn by Marriot in Wilmington, Del., while enjoying his continental breakfast during a flight-training trip.
Bill Parham watched hotel staff welcome people – consisting of the less fortunate who weren’t even staying at the hotel – to enjoy the remainder of the food after breakfast hours concluded.
The call didn’t last long, but the message resonated as he told his daughters that Christmas was going to look differently for the family residing in the Briarcliff Neighborhood of Peters Township.
For the last nine years, Jessy and her sister have created a family practice of their own by collecting money to buy gifts for foster kids in the Washington County Children and Youth Services program.
“I always knew my dad had a reason for doing things,” said Jessy, now a 24-year-old second lieutenant in the Marine Corps said. “I took a lot of pride and heart into the list. I put in a lot of work. I wanted it to be perfect.”
Being driven around by her father, Jessy went house to house ringing the doorbells of neighbors and strangers to ask for help in providing a Christmas morning similar to the one she was accustomed to.
“Many kids where we live don’t realize what situations these particular kids are in,” Jessy said of growing up in a bubble-like atmosphere. “People are always saying how we have to go to other countries to do all these good things but there are literally kids right down the road that – 10 minutes from us – that don’t even have a Christmas. Once I figured out how important it was and realized that if I didn’t do something then it might not get done, it was made a priority.”
The post-Thanksgiving collection effort, which has stretched to several hundred homes and reached $4,000 in some years, has helped in the Parham’s goal of providing three to four gifts to their list of 40 kids.
Even after Jessy decided to continue her education at Youngstown State University, she made sure that everything was in order to join her sister to receive the awkward looks and avoidance of other holiday shoppers to make sure they didn’t get behind the line of the family with numerous carts that sometimes stretched well beyond the checkout line.
“It’s about finding where the deals are because you can get so much more,” said Alyssa, a senior at Peters Township High School who will attend basic training in the Navy near Chicago at the end of July. “You can do so much more with the money you have.”
As the effort has grown, so has the help from members of the community who have made it a yearly request to help trim the ever-growing list by taking names each year.
“We aren’t doing this for the recognition,” Bill said. “What Jessy and Alyssa are doing is not only providing gifts but opening peoples’ eyes.”
However, something that hasn’t changed is the personal touch the Parhams put on their gifts that crowd the majority of their house before being individually wrapped, labeled and gifted.
“It’s a ton of wrapping but the beauty of Christmas is opening up gifts with your name on it,” Jessy said of the hours designated to carefully wrapping and sometimes even creating personalized stockings. “It might be the first personalized thing they’ve ever received in their entire life. It’s pretty incredible.”
While shopping lines haven’t necessarily been kind with the glares of other urgent shoppers, an experience Bill had in the line of a local hardware store made that phone call and the past nine years all worth it.
“I went up to the cashier to checkout and she asked me if I wanted to donate to charity,” he remembers of pulling out money to put into the collection. “We then got into a conversation about how my daughters do this yearly collection to create a Christmas for the foster kids in Washington County. I’ll never forget how she looked at me and said, ‘I was one of those kids. That moment changed my life.’ I started to get real emotional. That right there is why we do it.”