JCFPA Christmas Program
Welcome to the home of the Jackson County Foster Parent Association's Christmas Wish List Program.
Every year, all around the community, trees go up in stores and businesses with small tags on them. Each tag represents one of the roughly 335 children in foster care in Jackson County. These tags have a name, an age, and a wish for a Christmas present. It is up to the community to pick up a tag, buy a present and return it to the tree.
Each child receives presents from their wish list and it is up to the JCFPA volunteers to sort and prepare all of these presents for the children.
The program this year will be documented in photos, for all to see how this program works and what it entails each year.
Everything starts back in November with a bunch of volunteers coming out to a warehouse in White City to clean up the area and decorate for the holidays.
Next, the warehouse is divided into rows and columns and 335 squares are taped out on the floor, each representing a child, newborn to 18 years old, who is in foster care. 
Once everything is started, and the trees go out into the community, the presents start to pour in. 
This Care Bear is a sort of mascot for the JCFPA volunteers. If you can see on the tag, this is for a girl named Sallie, age 6, and she asked for a 20inch bike and helmet. The community member who picked this tag gave Sallie this Yellow Care Bear. The association dug into their own pockets to make sure that Sallie got her bike that she wanted for Christmas. The Care Bear sticks around to remind everyone that what can come in as a gift may not always be what was wished for.
December is finally in full swing, and the presents are really starting to come in. As the gifts come in, the volunteers put all the presents in the bags for each child.
Less than two weeks into December, things are heating up! The warehouse is starting to look a little like a toy store!
Well Christmas is just about here! Most of the bags with presents started going out to families on Monday the 22nd. Here's the full warehouse!
Thanks to everyone in the community that made this program such a success! 