A Season of Sweetness & Joy

A wish list that found its way to ‘Santa’. An unlikely Christmas far from home. A community that brightened a grief-stricken home. If you need a little extra warmth this year, these wonderful stories will do the trick.

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Toys to the World

The man who found a child’s Christmas wish list that had floated across the border decided to play Santa.

By Amy Wang

THE SPOT OF red was what first caught Randy Heiss’s attention on 16 December 2018. He was hiking the remote expanse of land behind his ranch in Patagonia, Arizona, a town near the US–Mexico border, when he spotted a balloon on the grass—or at least the tattered remnants of one. Heiss walked towards it with his dog, Feliz, thinking he should pick up the latex pieces and throw them away.

That’s when he noticed the balloon’s string was attached to a piece of paper.

“Dayami,” it read on one side, in a child’s writing. A hand-drawn bow accompanied the word.

Heiss flipped the paper over. It was a numbered list, all in Spanish. “My Spanish isn’t very good, but I could see it was a Christmas list,” he said.

Heiss was charmed. He suspected that a child had tried to send Santa Claus a Christmas wish list by balloon, something he used to do himself when he was a kid. Nobody had ever returned the letters Heiss had sent aloft, but he wondered whether he couldn’t find the girl who had sent this one.