Toys and holiday cheer were flying like reindeer Saturday morning as staff at Valley Regional Medical Center celebrated the holidays with their annual Breakfast with Santa event for hospital staff and their families.
The event serves as a show of appreciation and recognition for all the work the hospital staff does throughout the year, and as a way to make fun holiday memories together as a family in an otherwise busy time.
In years past the event featured breakfast, activities, a sing-along and photos with Santa Claus inside the hospital, but this year the event had to be changed to a drive through celebration due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
“Even though we are in the middle of a pandemic we cannot forget to thank and be grateful for the people that do all of this work,” said Mariana Tumlinson, director of Community and Public Relations at VRMC.
Staff and hospital administrators dressed up as elves, nutcrackers, and snowmen welcomed employees with cheers and waves to the drive-through lane to make a new kind of holiday memory this year.
Even Santa Claus made the long trip from the North Pole to see the children for his annual appearance at the hospital.
“It’s a little different with the cars coming up, but it makes it a whole lot easier on Santa,” said Santa Claus of the new socially distanced setup.
Santa Claus stopped to talk with each child through the windows of their parent’s car and hand them their to-go breakfast bags, a craft from the Brownsville Public Library and most importantly a new toy to take home with them.
The toys were given to the hospital as part of the First Responders Children’s Foundation’s Toy Express program. The organization, based in New York City, is part of a national program delivering more than 250,000 free toys and masks for first responder agencies and hospitals to give out to first responders and their communities during this difficult time.
Valley Regional Medical Center got on the list of distributors due to the experience of Dr. Tanzib Hossain who met with the First Responders Children’s Foundation’s president Jillian Crane and shared his experiences working at the hospital during some of the worst days of the pandemic.
“When he told me about Brownsville being hit badly and still being really, really bad that’s when I told him ‘hey we have our Toy Express that we are doing this year for the first time and we are going to certain hospitals. We’d love to go to a hospital in Texas in Brownsville where you were’,” said Crane.
When Mariana Tumlinson received their request she was shocked.
“It was so unexpected and we were so grateful and honored when they chose us to be one of their distribution sites,” said Tumlinson.
While she initially asked for only 300 toys to distribute, the foundation sent her thousands, some of which have already been distributed to first responder groups to give out in Brownsville, Los Fresnos and Port Isabel this holiday season.
During Breakfast with Santa, staff expected to give out around 150 of the toys to their first responder’s families.
Mattie Garza, Director of Physician and Provider Relations at VRMC, brought her two daughters Mary Collins, 3, and Campbell, 2, to see Santa.
“This is our first Santa experience so far. With the pandemic there are not as many opportunities, and so I felt like this would be an easy, fun and safe way for them to see Santa,” said Garza.
For CEO Art Garza not giving up on seeing the joy and togetherness this event provides to their hospital family was all the more reason to make the event possible this year.
“That’s the biggest gift we are going to get this year. It brings us back home, we are still family regardless of whatever we may be going through as a community and together we will get past this,” said Garza.
