Happy Sunday, everyone. Are you ready for some good news?
Today’s installment of Good News Sunday is politics free!
I’ve been reading your comments this week, and I know a lot of you are stressed out about Tuesday. I get it. Honestly, the signs look good. But when the future of our democracy is on the ballot, good vibes aren’t enough to help most of us sleep at night.
So today, I’m taking a break. No polls. No politics. Just a story about some very good people, a whole lot of plastic skeletons, and thousands of kids they’ve never met.
It starts in the fall of 2020, in Holly Springs, North Carolina. Everyone was stuck at home. Jeff Robertson, an Army veteran, had retired from the service and was trying to figure out what came next.
So he did what any reasonable dad does in a pandemic. He decorated for Halloween. A lot. He boarded up his windows and filled the yard with an army of skeletons. The plot, as he described it, was that the skeletons were “attacking to get inside the house to get our Halloween candy.” He just wanted to make his kids smile.
Then a local TV station came by and put his house on the news. Jeff asked his kids what they should do with the attention. They already had an answer. “We want to help sick children get out of the hospital,” they told him.
So the family put a sign in the yard asking people to donate to St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. They had no idea what would happen.
Within days, a family pulled up. The father thanked Jeff through tears. Their little girl, who was being treated at St. Jude, sat in the back seat. She was going through such a tough time, Jeff remembers, and she’d gotten to see his “goofy plastic skeletons.” He never learned their names, but that visit is why he kept going.
In the Robertsons’ first year, they raised more than $8,000. The next fall, Jeff started a Facebook group called Skeletons for St. Jude and invited other Halloween fanatics to join. More than 400 homes signed up, and they raised over $150,000. And it just kept growing from there.
Today, hundreds of families across the country put up their own displays every October, each with a sign and a QR code that sends donations straight to St. Jude. Together, they’ve raised more than $1.3 million. They passed the $1 million mark last October. This year, they’ve already cleared $225,000 by the time of this writing.
And every house has its own story. In Grand Rapids, Minnesota, a man named Jeffery Broking packed his grandmother’s yard with 40 animatronics.
In Bellefonte, Pennsylvania, the Mattie family’s display centers on a skeleton they call the Big LeBoneski. For their fifth year in the fundraiser, he’s hosting a Penn State tailgate in the front yard.
In Delmar, Maryland, Elizabeth Stripling covered her lawn and her neighbor’s with skeletons, tombstones, a werewolf and a witch. “We think a lot about kids at Halloween,” she said. “And that’s what Saint Jude is all about. It’s all about kids.”
There’s something about Halloween that brings out the good in us. It’s the one night a year we knock on strangers’ doors and trust that they’ll be kind. Most of the year, we don’t know our neighbors as well as we should. Then October comes, and somebody down the street spends three weeks building a skeleton pirate ship, and the whole block comes out to see it.
I also can’t help thinking about Jeff. A lot of us who’ve served know that feeling of coming home and wondering what’s next. He found his answer in a front yard full of skeletons, and in a little girl in the back seat of a car.
That’s the country I believe in. People who take the silly things they love and find a way to help kids with it. People who give five dollars to a stranger’s cause because a neighbor asked. None of it seems like much on its own, but it adds up to a million dollars, and a whole lot of kids getting to go home.
The fundraiser runs through the end of the year, if you want to chip in HERE.
Then, on Tuesday, go vote, and try to get some sleep. Whatever the results say, this is still who we are.
And that, my friends, is good news for your Sunday.
- Adam
You're right Adam. This story is what is so good about this country, the decency of people helping people they don't even know. Thank you for sharing such an uplifting story. It makes most everything better knowing this!
What a wonderful thing to do!