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They crowded around the man in the red suit with the white trim and the beard falling around his face.
“Ho! Ho! Ho!” he says to the children of the LeMoyne Gardens Unit of the Boys and Girls Clubs of Harlingen, ushering in a Christmas unlike anything this community has ever seen.
Santa has just arrived in a fire truck on Tuesday afternoon with sirens wailing as it pulls into the field behind the club where these kids spend many afternoons playing football or soccer. However, the candle of this Christmas party was lit 30 years ago when a stranger knocked on the door of a young girl and gave her a present.
And that present had her name on it.
Meet Aileen Avikova-Rensink, 36, chief executive officer at Enchanted Fairies, who remembers opening that door in house number 14 so long ago.
“I came to this country when I was six years old, and this is where I landed,” she says as kids line up outside the Club.
Many of the children are not members of the club, but that’s OK. Aileen and Enchanted Fairies are giving presents to 330 kids throughout LeMoyne and to give them all a glimmering memory to carry with them throughout their lives.
“We do magical fine art portraiture, and what that means is that we do immersive photography where little girls get to become fairies and little boys get to become warriors,” Aileen says. “Our mission is to empower children to be heroes of their own story so they can become heroes of their own lives.”
The kids and their parents pour into the club and into the field behind the club and find tables set up in neat rows and they crowd around the tables in eager anticipation as their eyes filled with wonder.
A woman with the passing years on her face enters with her arm around a wide-eyed eyed little girl toward a table. A much younger woman pushed a child in a wheelchair. The children seemed electrified with excitement and joy; a boy squealed and spun around with unrestrained delight, a woman with red hair and tattoos walked in with her kids, and a teenage girl in loose pajama pants sat on a bleacher with her head on her phone.
The parents and the children are joined now by Mayor Norma Sepulveda and Harlingen City Manager Josh Ramirez and firefighters and members of the board of directors for the Boys and Girls Clubs and so many local dignitaries.
“It really warms my heart,” says Sepulveda. “It shows that for a person with dedication and passion, the sky’s the limit.”
They all know there is joy in the air and they can feel the thrill of the evening and a glad optimism for grand things beyond the evening. Now four Chic-fil-A mascots amble through the back doors of the club and their red and white costumes immediately kick the energy of the evening into a higher gear and the kids rush toward them. The cows dance and hug and celebrate the moment and the boundless passion of the moment. A boy named Jayden looks at the big black hoof of one of the cows and shouts, “He looks like Bigfoot!”
They may not know it but they can feel it, that so much more is coming tonight.
They know, too, the significance of the generosity of a former LeMoyne resident and club member.
“It shows that even living here I can succeed and have a great life,” says Ayren Contreras-Mendoza, 11.
The families in LeMoyne Gardens have a familiar story. Many have immigrated recently from Mexico, they can’t always afford a fine Christmas with turkey dinners and presents. But they have each other.
The circumstances were as true 30 years ago as they are today.
Aileen’s family came to the U.S. with nothing, and on that Christmas night so many years ago her family didn’t have any food left.
“We didn’t have food, all we had was each other and that was our family and it was OK,” she recalled.
This family bond and this sense of cooperation and this strength of sacrifice still empowers the families here even today. Even without Christmas presents, they know how to persevere. Even if that knock on the door hadn’t come 30 years ago, Aileen and her family would still have persevered.
But it did come.
There was a man who had a laundry basket full of food,” she remembers. “He had one little present for each child and had our names on it. The name on the present meant so much to me because we weren’t social people. We were in survival mode so no one knew us.”
The power of that one gesture long ago was the spark that ignited her passion for grand things. Aileen was never able to attend college, but somehow through passion and good business sense she and her family have built Enchanted Fairies into a multi-million dollar business. The company has donated more than $2 million to children’s charities, and Tuesday Aileen presented Hilda Gathright, director of the LeMoyne Gardens Unit of the Boys and Girls Clubs, with a $50,000 check.
“It’s amazing,” she says later. “It was like a dream, just something all along I wished for something like this.”
She had received word some weeks earlier that a former resident who was now a mult-millionaire wanted to hold this huge Christmas event. Gathright doubted whether this could be for real until she received a picture of Aileen’s ID card from the Boys and Girls Clubs.
Aileen herself remembers the significance of that card. She knew the person with the food and the gifts was from the Boys and Girls Club because no one else knew her.
“One of the first things I ever did was come to the Boys and Girls Club, and I didn’t know what to expect, but I found a lot of identity, a lot of sense of belonging, especially when I got my little ID card. The card meant so much to me because it meant that I belonged somewhere.”
